Twenty-nine countries and thousands of military personnel are currently gathered in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific region for the world’s largest maritime military exercise.
The Rim of the Pacific Exercise, or RIMPAC, ends next week. But how much do we know about the military's greenhouse gas emissions during RIMPAC and as an industry?
"The exercises like RIMPAC, which this year are the largest in terms of the number of participating nations than ever before and includes 25,000 people doing what militaries do, which is consuming energy to have mobility and operations and testing new equipment, that's something that happens every other year, but it has the emissions profile that's similar to Washington, D.C., in a year," said Neta Crawford.
Crawford is the author of “The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions.” She's also the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at Oxford University.
Crawford first began digging into military emissions while trying to find data for a lecture at Boston University.
She said the Department of Defense has recently begun to reduce its emissions substantially, but it's still the single largest energy user in the U.S.
"I also found that it's one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world," she said. "I had no idea, and I've studied the military for 40 years."
"So then I wanted to understand how it got that way. And that started me on a path of calculating emissions because they're not readily available. The United States and the Kyoto Protocol negotiations wanted an exemption for military emissions, and they got it, and so they're not reported," Crawford told HPR.
Military emissions come from bases, facilities and operations, but also from the defense industry — and war itself.
"The installations, as I said, are only about 30% of the emissions; 70% is operational, and most of that is aircraft. The fuel that's consumed by a plane is, they don't get miles per gallon, they get gallons per mile."
So how can the military reduce emissions?
"One is you could green the fuels. And in 2016, RIMPAC did have some green fuels. The naval fuel was 10% biofuel. And you could reduce the amount of exercises, or do more computer simulations for training. Or you could, in fact, reduce the overall footprint of the military," she said.
Crawford said there needs to be more understanding of the cost-benefit.
"Because the emissions make us less secure. Climate change is certain. The wars that they're preparing us for are not certain, and we have room right now to diminish the impact of climate change if we reduce emissions for things that aren't needed, or where there's room to reduce emissions, and that's why we're looking at this."
This interview aired on The Conversation on July 24, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
