Nuclear war and global warming seem quite opposite in some respects—the potential instantaneous fire of nuclear explosions and the fear of a subsequent “nuclear winter” versus the slow but certain melting of glaciers and sea level rise, punctuated by wildfire or violent storms. However, the existential threat posed by nuclear war and military greenhouse gas emissions are both manifestations of the theory that military force is necessary to secure us from some potential danger and to ensure a way of life. According to nuclear deterrence strategy, nuclear weapons are meant to deter dangerous adversaries. They also allow great powers to determine the shape of world order. Further, the militaries that are symbolic of sovereign states are there to protect the people inside them from invasion or domestic unrest. While armed forces are sometimes used in wars of aggression, they are first of all intended to provide security. An individual’s consumption of fossil fuels and the deforestation that fueled economic growth were meant to secure us from poverty, hunger, and cold. Fossil fuel consumption has also been part of the industrial growth cycle, raising standards of living, and making some people enormously wealthy.
How did U.S. military emissions grow to be so large? How did our military forces become part of the problem, adding to the threat that climate change poses to our survival? Why did the [U.S. Department of Defense] resist counting all military emissions in the 1990s? What caused the military to start attending to climate change? Why have U.S. military emissions declined in recent years? Are the predictions of “climate wars” realistic or alarmist? Is the U.S. national security strategy appropriately working to avert the likelihood and risk of climate wars? If climate change could cause war, how does the United States need to be prepared for those wars and for all other potential military contingencies?
MIT Press
This book tracks the formation of a three-stranded braid and offers a way to reconceptualize and change the seemingly inevitable and tightly woven relationship between fossil fuel use and military, industrial, and strategic institutions.
The first strand, the growth of U.S. military emissions since the nineteenth century, is rooted in the way U.S. military and foreign policy decision makers have thought about the relationship between war and fossil fuels. I argue that the U.S. economy and military have, for more than 170 years, been on a path that has become the deep cycle: a long-term cycle of economic growth, fossil fuel use, and dependency. The dominant narrative describing the rise of greenhouse gases, which stresses increasing human population, does not mention the role of militarization and war. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in 2016: “For most of human evolution, CO2 levels hovered around 278 ppm [parts per million], helping to maintain the global climate in a relatively stable state conducive to agriculture and the growth of human populations. That all changed starting in the 1850s with massive deforestation around the world.” The cause of deforestation in the 1850s was increasing agricultural production to meet the needs of a growing human population. “Then in the 1950s, a dramatic increase in the burning of fossil fuels—coal to make electricity and steel, oil for vehicles and manufacturing—vastly accelerated the rate of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.” The demand for manufactured goods accelerated in line with population growth.
Yet, war and mobilization for it has been a spark for deforestation, innovation, industrialization, and increasing fossil fuel use in the United States and elsewhere. Specifically, the military’s role in the search for markets in Asia, the Civil War, the wars of westward expansion, the colonization of the Philippines, and World War I and World War II industrialization prompted innovations in transportation that accelerated fossil fuel use and necessitated the acquisition of bases for refueling military and commercial vehicles. In this, I agree with emerging literature in climate change and transportation research that shows that military demand for fossil fuel has been, and continues to be, a key driver for the adoption of fossil fuels. Of course, the perceived necessity for access to fossil fuels was also driven by the logic of trade/market globalization and consumer capitalism and it is difficult to disentangle the role of military and commercial drivers of increased emissions. As the U.S. military grew increasingly dependent on coal, and then oil, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it focused on developing the tactics, strategies, and military bases and equipment necessary to ensure easy access to a secure supply of fossil fuels. Indeed the U.S. armed forces and other militaries have, at times, shown flashes of tactical brilliance in ensuring that they would have a steady supply of fuel. This was the institutionalization of fossil fuel demand and use, which then resulted in past and current military greenhouse gas emissions. Part of this strand is how, in the last several decades, the U.S. military has also become increasingly interested in fuel efficiency as a way to increase its mobility and decrease vulnerability to fuel shortages and adversaries who could attack fuel in transit.
Policy makers’ beliefs about the world—embedded in military doctrines, organizational interests, the physical infrastructure of its domestic and overseas bases, and the scale of its military industry—leave an atmospheric trace.
The second strand consists of the ways the military’s dependence on fossil fuels for war have shaped the world beyond the military itself. Institutions were constructed over the last two centuries to realize decision makers’ beliefs about the role of fossil fuels in war—weapons, political alliances, bases, military doctrine, infrastructure, and industries that have come to shape our world and the choices we believe are inevitable. In other words, beliefs about fossil fuels became military doctrines that were self-evident to military leaders who stressed the necessity of acquiring or protecting access to fossil fuels and refueling stations, and denying those fuels to enemies. Further, military industries were, in times of war, disproportionately supported by government demand and subsidies, and this in turn shaped and stimulated the larger industrial economy, further cementing the importance of fossil fuels and the necessity of protecting access to them. I show that, at least in the past two centuries, beliefs about the role of fossil fuels and the institutional structures that realized those beliefs have led to or intensified some regional rivalries and armed conflicts. And so, as the military protected its capacity to go anywhere and do anything policy makers should want, they spent resources—including fossil fuel—to ensure access to oil. The desire to protect access to oil for both war and industry have at times led to war, and so this is also a tale of strategic blindness and inflexibility.
The third strand is the military and international security community’s dawning realization of the causes of global warming and its members’ farsighted understanding and beliefs about global warming’s daunting consequences, including the link between climate change and social and political stress. Humans are increasingly conscious of and reacting to the effects of climate change on their local environments: the increase and intensification of flooding, storms, fires, drought, and famine that have killed people and led to migration as people move from areas where they cannot grow food, or where life has become untenable. The fact that the atmosphere has been altered by fossil fuel use, and this in turn has stressed human institutions, caused some military leaders, academics, and strategists to warn that global warming could lead to increased risk of armed conflict—that climate change is a “threat multiplier.” They even warn of potential “climate wars.” But the fear of climate wars has been contested by others who argue that even as governments are strained to meet the demands caused by climate disasters, even as some resources such as water and arable land become scarce, armed conflict is not inevitable. While human security—public health, food security, and the means to make a living—will be impacted by climate change, there is concern that “securitizing” climate change risks militarizing our response, which itself could be wasteful and ineffective, or at worst, counterproductive, exacerbating global warming.
The three strands—beliefs about war and fossil fuel, the institutions constructed over hundreds of years to make war possible and successful, and the environmental and social consequences of those beliefs and actions, including the potential for human insecurity and war brought about by climate change—are woven tightly and seemingly inextricably together. Any one country’s military and military-industrial emissions are a consequence of its larger understanding of its strategic context—its grand ambitions, its view of the threats it faces at the moment, and its fears about the future. In other words, policy makers’ beliefs about the world—embedded in military doctrines, organizational interests, the physical infrastructure of its domestic and overseas bases, and the scale of its military industry—leave an atmospheric trace. To the extent that countries enter into and continue militarized strategic rivalries, they can extend and deepen the cycle of military fossil fuel demand, alliances, acquisition of overseas bases, and military industrialization. And a military’s emissions are also a consequence of the political, strategic, and economic choices that have over several decades developed into institutions—or in the case of the United States, over about 200 years. In sum, through their belief systems, their accounts of cause and effect, decision makers construct a world of institutions and practices that have both intended and unintended consequences. Thus, reducing military emissions will require rethinking strategic assumptions and breaking a deep cycle of economic growth, expansion, military mobilization, and military-industrial production that is reliant on fossil fuels.
Excerpted with permission from The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions, by Neta C. Crawford. Copyright © 2022. Available from The MIT Press.