The Deep Cycle and Climate Change as an Existential Threat: How the Pentagon became the world's largest single greenhouse gas emitter and why it's not too late to break the link between national security and fossil fuel consumption.

• Author: Crawford, Neta C.
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT - The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions

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?

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...