IN JUNE, the secretary-general of NATO announced that the military alliance would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. As the website Energy Monitor reported, observers objected to important details being left vague, such as which countries it covered. Since the first international climate summit, military emissions have been largely exempt from reporting and reduction targets. It is time this changed, says Neta Crawford, an international relations expert at the University of Oxford. In her new book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the rise and fall of US military emissions, she puts numbers to the emissions produced by NATO's largest member, the US military. Using only publicly available sources, she finds that in 2019 the US military and its manufacturers were responsible for emissions equivalent to 105.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The official number cited is about half that.
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