The world is on fire
Scientists warn the flames are fanned by climate change.
And world leaders know urgent action is needed.
EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen emerges in fire
The infernos and hurricanes we've seen over the last few weeks
are only a very small window into what our future could look like.
Yet for all their official concern and ambitious new programs,
there’s one global warming factor politicians have refused to tackle.
I don’t think they even discuss it.
It’s quite bonkers it hasn’t been looked at before.
Most European Union governments - along with those all over the
world -- are deliberately ignoring one of their most prolific polluters.
They’ve completely excluded it from commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Who gets out of combatting climate change? The military.
EU politicians have been very busy making dramatic plans to save the planet –
Setting a lofty goal for net greenhouse gas emissions of
When it comes to cutting carbon and the like, zero is the magic number.
And it's not just "magic" -- it's mandatory.
EU governments are legally required to come up with
ways to take the same volume of harmful gases out of the air as they put in it .
That’s called “net zero” and they have to get there by 2050.
Sounds good, right?
The problem is – the numbers don’t add up.
Governments carefully calculate emissions from many sectors, like energy, transport and industry.
That’s crucial information when working out what can
be reduced or offset...with that goal of net zero.
But you can’t do that math correctly without counting the military...
in many cases a country’s largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm not sure that all militaries realize that!
that they’re the biggest emitter or that they’re keeping it secret?
the biggest single emitter.
So big that at least one military emits more greenhouse gases than some entire countries.
A project at Brown University estimated that in 2017 the American armed forces
ALONE created more emissions than, for example, all of Portugal or Sweden.
This study says if the US military were a country,
it would rank somewhere between the 47th and 55th biggest polluter in the world.
But nobody knows for sure – because governments don’t have to reveal their military emissions.
And most choose to share zero
The military sector turned out to be like a hole where nobody knew anything.
That’s what EU lawmaker Malin Bjork learned when she wanted to find out
how big the military’s carbon “bootprint” might be she’s a disarmament advocate.
The reporting is just not there. The military is excluded. According to both the Kyoto Protocol,
the Paris agreement, the military doesn't have to report. And that has consequences.
They don't. And in several countries, there were no national figures on the military emissions.
No national figures on EU militaries’ emissions...even though governments do
collect and publish figures for other sectors and expect them to reduce those emissions.
But not the armed forces.
apparently here no accountability, no
target setting, no participation in facing our generation's or our time's most pressing issue.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the first international attempt to limit global emissions.
But when it came to the military’s share, governments argued that publishing figures
could reveal critical information about their arsenals and activities.
So they were allowed to keep that information secret.
Kyoto's successor, the Paris Agreement of 2015 doesn’t specifically exempt the defense
sector but it leaves it up to governments to decide how and where to cut emissions.
And still, no mandatory reporting.
Finding only patchy and partial figures, Bjork and fellow EU lawmakers from the
Left Group commissioned their own study from environmental NGOs.
You always follow the money to see where the largest emissions are going to be. Why hasn't this
been done before? Why are we the first people as a relatively small NGO based in the UK to look at EU
emissions of the military? It's quite bonkers it's not been looked at properly before that.
Linsey Cottrell works for the Conflict and Environment Observatory. She was one of the
researchers on the study and says leaving out the military is no small omission of emissions.
you're talking about a huge sector. You're talking about a sector that had a global expenditure
last year of two trillion U.S. dollars,
and that's increased despite the pandemic. they're typically the largest
government agency emissions because of their fuel expenditure, et cetera.
The study she worked on looked at the six EU countries with the largest defense budgets:
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
Only some of them choose to voluntarily report some of their military emissions.
Our estimates, based on the data that we did have available -- which was sparse, and there are
quite a few gaps in that -- from that, we estimated that the annual EU military
emissions are around about 24 million tons per year, and that was for 2019. And when you look
was that was what was actually reported to the U.N. that was around 4.5 million tons.
So there's a big discrepancy between what's being reported and what we've estimated.
are governments just lying?
Cit's complete lack of transparency.
That's lying, isn't it?
Well. You could... you could say that, but the military have no obligation in
many countries to provide this reporting, so if they're not being asked to provide it, then
they've got no requirements.
So planes like this are flying under the radar when it comes to carbon emissions...thanks
to that exemption based on national security concerns. No country seems to be publishing the
full extent of their military emissions -- and so far there’s little public pressure to make them.
But we’ve learned that it’s not just that governments won’t TELL what their militaries
emit...they don’t even KNOW. Because -- they don’t measure.
We asked one Estonian EU lawmaker if his country calculates military emissions...
Estonian MEP Riho Terras
No, and I don't think any other country does.
Riho Terras used to be Estonia’s chief of defense, so he would know.
He suggests fighting climate change could put European militaries at a disadvantage.
I don't think it is possible because then
we should be sure that the adversary will do the same thing and that will not happen for sure. Not
Russia or China would consider that as a priority. But if countries could
do it sensibly, having the military readiness at the high level, then it makes sense.
But the European Union's latest emissions reduction plan STILL doesn't require counting,
let alone reporting of military emissions.
Remember, EU governments are legally bound to become carbon neutral by 2050. If they aren’t
adding in their military emissions, how can they know how much they have to cut to reach net zero.
If the EU isn't on it, who might be able to
convince armed forces to count - and curb - their emissions?
How about... NATO?
Global warming is a crisis multiplier and it will affect our security
and therefore it matters for NATO.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has some serious green credentials – he's
a former UN climate envoy. He was at those Kyoto negotiations when
the militaries got their free pass on emissions. But he says time’s up.
Military has not been part of the climate effort until now. “That was possible when we didn't have
big ambitions when it comes to total reductions. When more and more allies want net zero, then we
have to include military in one way or another. Second, what at least we need is better data,
better figures for military emissions. And thirdly, of course, we cannot end up in a
situation where we have to choose between either green and environmentally-friendly military or
effective. We need to reconcile the need for operational effectiveness and reduce emissions.
Others take it even further and argue militaries will
lose effectiveness if they Don't reduce emissions.
operational readiness is related to our security environment and climate change
changes that security environment. So it also affects the operational capabilities
that we have down to the soldier level. If he needs to operate in 50, 60 degrees Celsius,
we need to change his his equipment so that he's able to do that.
General Tom Middendorp used to command
the Dutch armed forces and admits being late to link global warming and defense.
Now he chairs an international council of experts on the military and climate change.
Climate change is a direct threat to our harbors, to our key facilities.
Sea-level rise -- and the biggest naval base in the world is in Norfolk in the US,
the Navy already has to sail out several times per year because the water is coming
too high and it will only increase. So we need to protect those kind of facilities
and make sure that even in this changing climate, we are still ready to do our job.
At their June summit in Brussels, NATO leaders adopted an "action plan"
to increase analysis, assessment and awareness of the threats posed by climate change.
But on emissions, the only commitment was that NATO will come up with a system to
finally measure them in a consistent way. That, says the plan, eventually
Could contribute to formulating VOLUNTARY
goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the military.
A basic but necessary step on NATO’s part, experts say.
Up until now, obviously, climate change has been an enormous security headache,
which allies have been dealing with individually, but surprisingly, NATO wasn't.
It was Jamie Shea’s own headache for years, as he headed NATO’s office of
Emerging Security Challenges. He urges allies to support the action plan.
This is all the more important, paradoxically, Teri, at a time when obviously more confrontation
with Russia, more geopolitical competition is meaning that military forces are training, they're
exercising more frequently. You know, they're getting their tanks and their armored personnel
carriers, their fighters out of the warehouses and they're flying them around to demonstrate resolve.
NATO has to demonstrate deterrence, but it also means that the allies are burning up a
lot more fuel for these exercises. If allied governments are committed to climate change,
I don't think they can give their security alliance a free pass in this respect.
The environmentally-minded Stoltenberg only has one more year in this job. There is
significant doubt that he'll manage to get NATO militaries to start cutting emissions.
Estonia’s former defense chief Riho Terras
is among those skeptical allies will take much action within NATO.
But he thinks they may eventually end up changing for different reasons.
I'm not sure that they have agreed on reducing emissions of the militaries,
and I don't think they even discuss it. but since members of NATO are members of the EU
mostly and the EU, the green deal is in the big business. So probably the countries will do it.
There's no reason or no excuse for an individual government to not do their piece of work.
And that would maybe be the message. So don't wait
for somebody else to do it. You just start to do it. I don't see why France
is not reporting. I don't see why, you know, Spain is not reporting properly. Just do it.
In the end, that’s what it comes down to individual governments deciding
on their own to reduce one of their biggest sources of greenhouse gases.
NATO will develop a way to count emissions,but has no power to make militaries report what they find.
The EU could have made military emissions an
issue in its “Green Deal” goal to be climate neutral by 2050 but it didn’t.
So where are we heading?
Some countries are stepping up. The American military,
NATO’s largest, has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,
after President Joe Biden declared the climate crisis central to U-S foreign and security policy.
The UK has produced an aggressive climate action plan for its military,
acknowledging that defense produces half the UK government's total emissions.
And that same UK government is in charge of the next big thing
in environment policy the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November
but the topic of curbing military emissions is not even mentioned on the presidency agenda.
EU lawmaker Bjork still believes the world is slowly waking up to the climate crisis.
I do think even the fact that the climate has now been put on the highest level of priority for
so many people and especially the young ones, shows that something has changed.
There's a shift going on. People are ready to see things that maybe
ten years ago people did not want to see.
The pressure is growing and the generation of voters who will live through climate change is
coming of age. They aren’t likely to give militaries or anyone else
a free pass.