20 hours Ago By Julia Musto
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says his department “does not do climate change c**p,” despite the military being one of the largest producers of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gas emissions. “We do training and warfighting,” the former Fox & Friends Weekend anchor said in a Sunday post on social media. He was responding to comments made by new Pentagon Spokesman John Ullyot, who told CNN that “climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part” of the department’s mission.
“The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat,” Hegseth told reporters in February. “We’re in the business of deterring and winning wars.” That stance is not surprising given the Trump administration’s effort to downplay climate change from the federal government and the Pentagon .
But, it is in stark contrast to the department’s previous position and flies in the face of what researchers know: that the U.S. military is responsible for more annual emissions of carbon dioxide than many countries.
The Defense Department currently has 128 coastal military installations in the U.S. that are facing the threats of rising sea levels, flooding and stronger hurricanes.
Tornadoes have damaged Air Force and Army bases in Ohio and Virginia in recent years. Research suggests there is a greater risk of more off-season twisters in a warmer world. “Hegseth calls it ‘climate change c**p.
’ The Pentagon once called it military readiness. Airfields in Oklahoma are damaged from tornadoes; subs in VA from sea water rise; bases in Guam from flooding; NORAD in CO impacted by fires,” Harvard Kennedy School Professor Juliette Kayyem said on social media. “It wasn't about wokeness.
It never was.” "You can't train for combined operations with allies and partners if the training facilities are flooded," Biden-era Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in 2023. "You can't run an installation without water because you're in a drought and you can't adequately prepare for future threats if you're occupied with urgent crises.
" Climate-driven extremes can destroy military capabilities, exacerbate and contribute to conflict and result in humanitarian crises, such as food and water shortages. The Department of Defense produces about 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year . Metric tons are slightly more than a U.
S. ton, and a million metric tons are roughly the same mass as a million small cars, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That tally was from 2022, and emissions had been trending downward since tracking began in 2010 due to the curtailment of collective training amid the Covid pandemic, the gradual reduction in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and improvements in enhancing energy efficiency and the deployment of renewable energy.
These emissions come largely from the buildings and vehicles needed to support its operations. In fiscal year 2016, the Defense Department consumed about 86 million barrels of fuel for operational purposes, according to Neta C. Crawford, a political scientist at Oxford University.
Democratic lawmakers wrote in 2021 that the Department of Defense was the “single-largest consumer of energy in the U.S. and the world’s single-largest institutional consumer of petroleum,” with the military accounting for “77-to-80 percent of federal energy use.
” In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University alleged that the U.S. military was “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more carbon-dioxide equivalent than most countries.
” “The US military has long understood it is not immune from the potential consequences of climate change – recognizing it as a threat multiplier that can exacerbate other threats – nor has it ignored its own contribution to the problem,” said author Dr. Patrick Bigger, of the Lancaster University Environment Centre. “Yet its climate policy is fundamentally contradictory — confronting the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, a situation it is locked into for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe,“ he said.
Like big oil companies, the greenhouse gas emissions the U.S. military produces are turning up the heat.
Last year was the hottest year on record . Sweltering conditions can hamper any operations. America’s apparent turn away from reducing emissions will come with repercussions beyond any border lines, scientists have assured.
The Department of Defense sticking its head in the sand does nothing but ignore the problem, researchers claim. “It’s the elephant in the room,” David Vine, author of, “Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World” told Al Jazeera in 2023. “It operates with this kind of cloak of invisibility despite having a long track record of very serious damage.
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