https://www.commondreams.orgJessica Corbett, staff writer

"From the 2001 launch of the so-called War on Terror to 2017, the Pentagon generated at least 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—with annual rates exceeding the planet-warming emissions of industrialized countries such as Portugal or Sweden—according to new research.

Boston University professor Neta C. Crawford details the U.S. Department of Defense's massive contributions to the global climate emergency in a paper (pdf) published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"The U.S. military's energy consumption drives total U.S. government energy consumption," the paper reads. "The DOD is the single largest consumer of energy in the U.S., and in fact, the world's single largest institutional consumer of petroleum."

"Absent any change in U.S. military fuel use policy, the fuel consumption of the U.S. military will necessarily continue to generate high levels of greenhouse gases," the paper warns. "These greenhouse gases, combined with other U.S. emissions, will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios that the military predicts and that many climate scientists say are possible."

Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project, estimates U.S. military emissions—which largely come from fueling weapons and equipment as well as operating more than 560,000 buildings around the world—from 1975 to 2017, relying on data from the Energy Department because the Pentagon does not report its fuel consumption numbers to Congress.

In the paper, she also examines patterns of military fuel use since 2001 in relation to emissions and the Pentagon's views on "climate change as a threat to military installations and operations, as well as to national security, when and if climate change leads mass migration, conflict, and war."

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