Pirate's Cove

Well, might as well. The military leadership is doing all they can to make the U.S. military virtually worthless in protecting the nation from threats

‘We Must Do Our Part to Mitigate Climate Change’ – The Military’s Pollution Problem

In the fall of 2018, Neta C. Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, prepared to teach a class on climate change designed to help students think about the issue in a big-picture way. Crawford’s research expertise is in war, so she wanted to include a statistic on the military’s contribution to greenhouse gases.

“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should just tell them what the emissions are for the U.S. military,’” Crawford says. “It was meant to be a line on a slide in a lecture.”

But when she went to look up the figure, she couldn’t find anything reliable. Instead, she found scattered and incomplete data on how much fuel the military consumed and how much carbon it emitted. The information that did exist largely didn’t include overseas operations, even though the United States had been at war for nearly two decades. Major categories of fuel consumption, like much of the fuel used for aviation, seemed to be missing.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol—the world’s first legally binding, international climate treaty—created a reporting loophole for militaries, exempting many of the greenhouse gases emitted during military operations from counting against a country’s emissions totals. While the 2015 Paris Accords did away with this exemption, they didn’t replace it with an obligation. Rather, the decision of whether to report military emissions—and how to calculate them—was left up to individual countries.

The result is a gap in our understanding of the United States’ climate footprint. Research from academics like Crawford, who now studies the issue, shows that the Department of Defense is a major producer of greenhouse gases, with more emissions than many industrialized nations. The United States—and other countries—have said they are committed to reducing military emissions, and earlier this summer, NATO released its Action Plan on Climate Change and Security, acknowledging that better emissions data would help guide member states’ military planning. But there is no consistent methodology and reporting requirement for these emissions. As the United States and other countries work toward net-zero emissions by 2050, Crawford and others say, the lack of clear data from the U.S. Defense Department—the world’s largest employer—and other militaries is a major stumbling block.

Who cares? This is just silly. Military vehicles, planes, ships, and helicopters need fuel. They don’t run on unicorn farts and green feelings.

Crawford’s hunt for a clear statistic on military emissions to show her class led her to a new research focus: trying to puzzle out just how much fuel the U.S. military consumes and thus how much carbon it emits. Using Department of Energy data, Crawford found that the U.S. military is a major polluter. Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has produced more than 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. Crawford acknowledges her data is likely incomplete—but even with the available data, she found that the U.S. military emits more than entire countries like Portugal and Denmark, and that the Department of Defense accounts for nearly 80% of the federal government’s fuel consumption.

Some of this is because the U.S military owns a lot of property—and has a lot of buildings to heat and power. In 2018, the Defense Department had some 585,000 facilities, spread over 27 million acres in 160 different countries. Each of these buildings emit greenhouse gasses; in 2013, Crawford’s report found, the Pentagon building itself emitted more than 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Crawford found that installations account for about a third of Defense Department energy consumption. But the overall number has slowly decreased over the last decade, in large part due to energy initiatives across the service branches.

Let’s be honest: this is all about reducing the effectiveness of the U.S. military, because the leftists who make up the Cult of Climatrology have despised the military since the 1970’s. They couldn’t defund it, so, they’ve worked to destroy it from the inside, and have been doing a good job as of late, what with all the Wokeness, letting in the gender confused and giving them transition services (meaning they aren’t actually doing their military jobs), reducing standards, training on CRT, and so much more. You aren’t going to replace a tank or military jet that uses fossil fuels with a “green” alternative and have a viable fighting force.