“On November 20, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future hosted a seminar exploring how the Pentagon thinks about its fuel use and climate change, featuring Neta C. Crawford, Professor and Chair of the BU Department of Political Science and a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow.”
The video of the talk is available at https://www.bu.edu/pardee/2019/11/21/upcoming-seminar-the-pentagon-greenhouse-gases-climate-change/
Here are my notes:
Professor Crawford is with the Cost of War Project (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/) and has been looking at the USA wars since 9/11 in which an estimated 800,000 have been killed, including 7000 US military with 50,000 seriously wounded. Just one of the many troubling issues about this is that civilian casualties in Afghanistan have increased over the years, with the last few years producing more and more casualties.
Wars have been institutionalized in the USA budget and are being paid for by borrowing rather than through taxes, with the USA involved in 80-90 countries for counter terrorism and the Department of Defense being 77-80% of the Federal government's carbon footprint. While the military is planning for climate change as a factor leading to war, recognizing that war is a cause of desertification, and asking, “Does climate change lead to war and does war lead to climate change?”, the military still does not explicitly link their fuel use to climate change nor tell Congress how much fuel it uses. Neither DOE nor EPA aggregate such fuel use either and DOD and DOE do not have the same standards and metrics for greenhouse gas measurement. But then under the Kyoto Protocols nations are allowed to exempt overseas military greenhouse gases from reporting.
Given the figures available, 30% of DOD fuel is for installations, 70% is for operations, with aircraft being the largest as aircraft fuel is measured in gallons per mile not miles per gallon. Centcom alone is 24% of the DOD energy budget.
However, the end of the Cold War saw a dramatic decline in DOD greenhouse gases, probably due to base closures, and there has been a generally consistent reduction of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by USA military since 1991, even with our latest two decades of war, and reliance on fuel oil has been significantly reduced. Yet, the 15% of USA industry that is devoted to the military nor the emissions from attack on oil fields in combat zones are not part of the estimates available.