US Military Exempt From Carbon Targets

By Steve Hynd

 Our friend Charles Davis writes:

Climate change has been branded a threat to national security, but a future global treaty addressing the issue is likely to exempt from regulation most of the greenhouse gases associated with overseas military activities and the world�s largest polluter�the U.S. armed forces...

...�The U.S. military emissions abroad are not counted in the national inventory, and they�re not counted in anyone�s inventory,� notes Steve Kretzmann, executive director of the environmentalist group Oil Change International. And that poses a problem to any effort intended to effectively combat climate change, he says, because �the annual emissions of the U.S. military operating offshore are of course huge�I�m sure greater than many nations�and these are not factored into the discussions.�

Indeed, of the petroleum purchased by the military in 2008, the Pentagon�s Defense Energy Support Center says more than a third�47.4 million barrels�was burned overseas. According to EPA, that translates into 20.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, more than the total emissions of 129 individual countries. And that figure does not take into account the greenhouse gas emissions associated with other aspects of international military activity�like the dropping of bombs and destruction of buildings�on which there is little scientific literature and even less desire on the part of political leaders to address.

A 2008 report from Oil Change International that estimated the carbon footprint of the Iraq war found it responsible for �at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.� Ranked as a country, �it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world�s nations do annually.�

That the U.S. military has a sizable greenhouse gas footprint overseas is not in dispute. Discussing the issue, on the other hand, is problematic.

�It can be a bit of a delicate subject,� says a former senior Defense Department official who was deeply involved in the debate over the Kyoto Protocol. �We�re the largest military in the world and we�re going to be the most penalized if military emissions are counted, so that has to be considered.�

Security think-tanks and the Pentagon have been talking for a couple of years now about how climate change is to be the next major national security threat, creating resource wars, terrorism, famine and population shifts. It's mindbogglingly dumb on a national security level that the military should be handed a free pass to make matters worse then expected to deal with the consequences. But on the level of the military-industrial complex creating its own demand for it gobbling up ever more resources it makes perfect sense. The beast must be fed!