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Fueling the Flames: How the West's Military Emissions Undermine Climate Action
It’s easy for world leaders to point fingers at Azerbaijan for its oil-dependent economy while failing to acknowledge the massive carbon bootprint of their own militaries.
Nov 22, 2024
As world leaders are finalizing another round of climate negotiations, they continue to sidestep the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gas emissions: the U.S. military. While frontline communities face devastation from climate disasters, the Pentagon pumps out more emissions than 140 countries combined.
Despite last year's commitment to move away from fossil fuels, current negotiations are hindered by disagreements among nations with some oil-producing countries resisting the reaffirmation of this pledge. The failure to uphold the COP28 agreement could undermine the credibility of international climate efforts and impede progress toward global emission reduction targets.
This year, COP29 met in Azerbaijan under the leadership of Mukhtar Babayev, the country’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Criticisms of Azerbaijan’s ties to the oil industry quickly surfaced with some Western voices highlighting the influence of the fossil fuel sector on the summit. While this concern is valid, these same critics conveniently ignore their own deep complicity in the climate crisis, most glaringly, the United States’ military emissions.
The U.S. Department of Defense remains the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil, yet its emissions are systematically excluded from climate negotiations. The omission is by design. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, military emissions have been given a free pass, thanks to pressure from U.S. negotiators. The numbers are staggering. The U.S. military consumes more than 100 million barrels of oil annually, producing emissions equivalent to the entire nation of Sweden. Its 800 overseas bases require constant fuel resupply, while Navy carriers, Air Force jets, and Army vehicles guzzle fossil fuels at an astounding rate. During the Iraq War alone, the Pentagon’s daily consumption reached 1.2 million barrels—more than 94% of countries globally.
Yet, instead of tackling this massive source of emissions, Congress continues to expand the military budget, approving $886 billion for FY2024, while climate funding remains a fraction of that amount. The cruel irony is that the communities most vulnerable to climate impacts, poor, Black, and brown communities both domestically and globally, bear the heaviest burden of both military operations and climate devastation. The Pentagon itself acknowledges climate change as a “threat multiplier” that will intensify conflicts and migration. Yet, its massive carbon footprint accelerates the very crises it claims to be preparing for. Military climate emissions create a deadly feedback loop that sacrifices the most vulnerable communities for the sake of military dominance.
Some progressive voices are finally breaking through. Representative Barbara Lee introduced legislation in 2001 requiring the Pentagon to track and reduce its emissions. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have demanded that military emissions be included in climate agreements. But far more pressure is needed from civil society and frontline communities who cannot afford to wait decades for gradual carbon reductions while the Pentagon's emissions continue unabated.
It’s easy for world leaders to point fingers at Azerbaijan for its oil-dependent economy while failing to acknowledge the massive carbon bootprint of their own militaries. True climate leadership requires confronting all major sources of emissions, even those wrapped in national security rhetoric. Excluding military emissions from climate agreements is a moral failure that undermines any serious effort at emissions reduction. The climate crisis demands we finally confront the true cost of endless war and military expansion. Until we do, climate summits will remain elaborate theater while the Pentagon’s carbon bootprint stamps out hope for a livable future. The communities on the frontlines of climate chaos from the Louisiana coast to the Pacific Islands deserve better than empty promises while military emissions remain off the books.
True climate leadership means having the courage to tackle all major emission sources, even those within their own borders. The time has come to end the military's exemption from climate accountability.
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Trump Slammed Over Plans for National Emergency and Mass Deportations
"Mass deportations aren't just inhumane," one congresswoman said. "Trump has a recipe for economic disaster. Farmers, workers, and consumers... all pay the price."
Nov 18, 2024
Migrant rights advocates on Monday sharply criticized U.S. President-elect Donald Trump after he confirmed plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to pursue his long-promised mass deportations, despite legal and logistical barriers.
Shortly after Trump's electoral victory earlier this month, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing group Judicial Watch, welcomed reports that the incoming administration is "prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program."
Fitton's post was on Trump's platform, Truth Social. The president-elect responded early Monday, simply saying, "TRUE!!!"
While Trump didn't provide additional details on Monday, fearmongering about immigrants has been a priority for the president-elect since he entered politics during the 2016 cycle and recent reporting has previewed what could come when he returns to the White House after campaigning on a pledge to "launch the largest deportation program in American history."
In the latest elections, Republicans retained control of the U.S. House of Representatives and reclaimed a Senate majority, but Democrat Yassamin Ansari had a decisive win in Arizona's 3rd Congressional District. She said Monday that "Trump's plan to use the military to aid mass deportation is abhorrent and hateful, and will directly impact many of my constituents in AZ-03. Using the world's strongest military to target the most vulnerable community is not leadership, it's abuse of power."
Vanessa Cárdenas, senior director of communication for America's Voice, similarly said in a statement that "Trump continues promoting anti-immigration hate and is using it as an excuse to appropriate the military for domestic law enforcement and circumvent normal checks and balances on presidential power."
Cárdenas continued:
Trump and allies are attempting to justify their potential use of the military to conduct indiscriminate mass raids and roundups by wrapping it in the language of 'invasion' and the false notion that America is under assault, and it must be repelled by force. Yet just because Trump and allies have spent recent years normalizing this idea and making this assertion doesn't make it any less radical. Let's be clear, this is the adoption of a white nationalist conspiracy theory, already linked to multiple deadly acts of gun violence against civilians, which is driving federal policy and Republican agendas.
Despite the martial language and emphasis on the border and recent arrivals, make no mistake that the Trump team is planning to target long-settled immigrants and mixed-status families as part of their mass deportations. Having legal status and even citizenship is not necessarily a shield of protection. Their pledges to end immigration enforcement priorities, while making as many people as possible deportable, is a disturbing tell that their definition of 'criminal' will look fundamentally different from most Americans' conceptions. Perhaps most disturbingly, the resulting fear and cruelty that will be on display is likely a feature and not a bug to those in charge.
Pointing to Trump's previous term, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Monday that "my lesson from the first time around is that we absolutely cannot take things that the Trumpworld people say as gospel, given their total lack of specifics and total willingness to make grandiose pronouncements that are aimed at triggering the libs and making headlines."
"The National Emergencies Act is a specific law which unlocks specific authorities to do specific things—a president doesn't declare a national emergency and then become king. And 'use the military for deportations' isn't one of those specific things," he highlighted, citing the Brennan Center for Justice guide on emergency powers.
Reichlin-Melnick acknowledged that "last time, Trump invoked a specific emergency authority to unlock military construction funding—and direct more troops to do logistical support at the border" with Mexico.
The New York Timesreported Monday that during the Republican primary campaign, "Mr. Trump's top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build 'vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers' for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries."
Miller—architect of the forced family separation program from Trump's first term—is set to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the next administration. The president-elect has also named other immigration hard-liners for key posts: Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as "border czar" and GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for homeland security secretary.
"Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims," according to the Times. Trump's team also plans to "expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal" and "stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents."
Additionally, the newspaper noted, Trump intends to bolster the ICE ranks "with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act."
Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, explained in 2022 that "although it is often referred to as the 'Insurrection Act of 1807,' the law is actually an amalgamation of different statutes enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871" to enable "the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Monday expressed concern about Trump's potential use of another law enacted in 1978.
"Donald Trump plans to declare a national emergency and utilize the Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations," Omar, a war refugee, said on social media. "This xenophobia and cruelty shouldn't be allowed in America. We are going to fight it every step of the way."
As Nunn's Brennan Center colleague Katherine Yon Ebright detailed last month, the law "allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation," and although "enacted to prevent foreign espionage and sabotage in wartime, it can be—and has been—wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present in the United States."
While Trump and his allies have prepared to use any powers they can to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, rights advocates and reporters have warned of the consequences of their plans for not only those people, but also 20 million mixed-status families and citizens who would suffer from the economic consequences.
As Mother Jones' Isabela Dias recently laid out, mass deportations would have major negative impacts on care, food, and infrastructure while enriching charter flight operators, consulting firms, private prison companies, and surveillance contractors.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) issued a warning after Trump's Monday post, declaring that "this will hurt all of us."
Spotlighting a Monday report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) similarly stressed that "mass deportations aren't just inhumane—they'd devastate America's agricultural industry. Combined with his tariffs, Trump has a recipe for economic disaster. Farmers, workers, and consumers... all pay the price."
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Pentagon Fails Seventh Straight Audit as Annual US Military Budget Nears $1 Trillion
Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that would require the Pentagon to return a portion of its budget as a penalty for failing audits, but lawmakers from both parties have declined to consider the bill.
Nov 18, 2024
The Pentagon announced late last week that it failed its seventh consecutive audit as the sprawling, profiteering-ridden department wasn't able to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets.
As with its past failures to achieve a clean audit, the U.S. Defense Department attempted to cast the 2024 results in a positive light, with the Pentagon's chief financial officer declaring in a statement that "momentum is on our side."
The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for roughly half of the government's annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department's inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.
The latest financial assessment published Friday by the Defense Department's inspector general office estimates that the Pentagon has $4.1 trillion in assets. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a clean audit, as required by law.
"Of the 28 reporting entities undergoing stand-alone financial statement audits, nine received an unmodified audit opinion, one received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers, and three opinions remain pending," the Pentagon
said Friday.
Since the department's first failed audit in 2018, Congress has authorized trillions of dollars in additional military spending. According to the Costs of War Project, more than half of the department's annual budget "is now spent on military contractors" that are notorious for overbilling the government.
"The Pentagon's latest failed audit is a great signal to the incoming administration for where they can start their attempts at slashing government spending," Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams. "Instead of gutting veterans' benefits or the Department of Education as planned, they should start with the one major government agency that has never passed an audit, the Pentagon."
Progressive watchdogs and lawmakers have long cited the Pentagon's failure to pass a clean audit as evidence of the department's pervasive waste and fraud. The Pentagon buried a 2015 report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste out of concern that the findings would be used as a justification "to slash the defense budget," as The Washington Postreported at the time.
Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would have required the Pentagon to return a portion of its budget to the Treasury Department's general fund as a penalty for failing audits.
"Year after year the establishment on both sides of the aisle have prevented these amendments from receiving a single roll call vote," Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, wrote on social media over the weekend.
This story has been updated to include comment from Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project.
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