How the US became the biggest military emitter and stopped everyone finding out | Academic Neta Crawford warns that if the White House follows through on threats of war, emissions will soar and the planet will pay the price

From the article: he climate impact of Donald Trump’s geopolitical ambitions could deepen planetary catastrophe, triggering a global military buildup that accelerates greenhouse gas emissions, a leading expert has warned.

The Pentagon – the US armed forces and Department of Defense (DoD) agencies – is the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for at least 1% of total US emissions annually, according to analysis by Neta Crawford, co-founder of the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Over the past five decades, US military emissions have waxed and waned with its geopolitical fears and ambitions. In 2023, the Pentagon’s operations and installations generated about 48 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) – more planet-warming gases than emitted by entire countries including Finland, Guatemala and Syria that year.

Now, once again, the US military carbon footprint is on the cusp of rising significantly as Trump upends the old geopolitical order in his second presidency. In the first 100 days of his second term, Trump threatened military action in Panama, Greenland, Mexico and Canada, dropped bombs on Yemen and increased military sales to Israel, which has intensified its military assault on Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Lebanon.

Trump has also aligned the US with former adversaries including Russia, while hurling direct or thinly veiled threats at former allies including Ukraine and the entire Nato alliance. Relations with China have sunk amid Trump’s chaotic trade war.

“If Trump follows through with his threats, US military emissions will absolutely rise, and this will cause a ripple effect,” said Crawford, author of the book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions.