 "The US military is among the world's worst polluters. Here's what we know")
The United States military is a big polluter. A new study has now revealed the scale of its carbon footprint and how it can be fixed.
Research recently published in the journal PLOS Climate linked the impact of the US Department of Defense (DoD) spending on climate change. While America’s military has the largest global military presence, it has shied away from revealing its emissions of greenhouse gases.
Here’s why the US military’s environmental impact cannot be ignored.
Size of the US military
The US has the biggest military in terms of budget, firepower and presence.
According to research by David Vine, author of Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, there are over 750 overseas US military bases in about 80 countries.
The US military possesses 13,043 aircraft and 4,640 tanks. It has an estimated 2,127,500 military personnel.
“The US now has more than triple the number of overseas bases as it does diplomatic missions, all of which require fossil fuels for operations and generate waste and pollution,” Patrick Bigger, research director of the US-based Climate and Community Project (CCP) told Al Jazeera in 2023.
How US military is worst polluter than many nations
The US military’s carbon footprint is astronomical. It is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any institution on Earth. The American military generated an estimated 636 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent between 2010 and 2019.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIf the US military were a country, it would rank 47th globally in emissions, ahead of Sweden and Portugal.
The recent research, led by Prof Ryan Thombs of Penn State University, in the US, studied data from 1975 to 2022 to identify a link between military spending and energy consumption.
As spending increased, it led to higher energy use. On the other hand, a cut in military spending reduced energy consumption.
“We find that reductions in spending are associated with reductions in energy consumption from military facilities, vehicles, equipment, and jet fuel in particular,” Thombs told BBC Science Focus.
“Although future research is needed to investigate the specific mechanisms, these findings suggest that spending cuts may place greater pressure on the military to reduce the scale, distance, and frequency of movement of machinery, goods, and personnel than increases in spending do to increase these activities.”
The US military spending touched $997 billion in 2024. Thombs’ analysis found that if the US military spending were reduced by 6.59 per cent each year from 2023 to 2032, the Department of Defense’s annual energy savings would be equivalent to the total energy consumption of Slovenia, or the US state of Delaware.
A 2022 study had also found that the US military consumed more liquid fuels and emitted more greenhouse gases than most medium-sized countries.
In 2017, the American military had purchased about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted over 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels, as per a Quartz report.
Why military emissions can’t be ignored
Despite the US military’s gigantic carbon footprint, its environmental impact is rarely taken into account in climate change studies.
This is because of a lack of data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. The US had lobbied for the exemption of reporting military emissions from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set binding emissions targets for nations that signed.
This loophole was fixed in the 2015 Paris Accord, but reporting of military emissions remains optional.
Militaries, as a whole, are among the biggest consumers of fuel in the world, accounting for 5.5 per cent of global emissions, according to a 2023 report published by the CCP and UK think tank Common Wealth. Whereas civil aviation is responsible for around 2 per cent.
In the US military, jet fuel makes up for 55 per cent of total energy use over the past half-century.
In 2023, a group of environmental organisations wrote a letter to the United Nations, calling for stricter and transparent reporting of military emissions. “Our climate emergency can no longer afford to permit the ‘business as usual’ omission of military and conflict-related emissions within the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] process and international climate negotiations,” they said, as reported by Reuters.
A group of scientists and policy experts said in 2022 in a comment published in the scientific journal Nature, “Military emissions need to be put on the global agenda. They must be officially recognised and accurately reported in national inventories, and military operations need to be decarbonised.”
Is US military doing something about the problem?
The US military is cognisant of its contribution to climate change. While it has invested in developing alternative energy sources like biofuels, it makes up for only a small fraction of its spending on fuels.
In 2022, the US military released its first climate strategy, aiming to reduce the Army’s greenhouse gas pollution by 50 per cent by 2030 and achieve “net-zero” emissions by 2050.
It also included plans to build more army vehicles electric and to modernise “power generation, battery storage, land management, procurement” and “supply chain resilience”.
Professor Thombs told BBC that reducing aviation activities should be a huge focus if the US military wants to cut its carbon footprint. However, it is a hard ask.
This, Thombs said, “suggests that reducing the scale of aviation operations is imperative to reducing emissions.”
If the US military sees budget cuts, it would lessen aviation activity.
With inputs from agencies
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