Thread by @adamjohnsonNYC

Amazing how the Pentagon gets hundreds of these puffy write ups in supposedly sophisticated, climate-serious media but not once do they ever get asked or criticized for being one of the largest single carbon emitters on earth. It’s just mindless PR. npr.org/2021/10/26/104…

Again the DOD talks about climate change the way elites at Davos talk about “inequality”—in scare quotes. It is not something to be solved or even mitigated, it is to be managed and used to shore up existing power structures. In this case: another avenue to bloat defense budgets

When DOD reps chat up liberal media on climate—“see, even the pentagon takes climate change seriously!”—its essential to understand that the two groups are largely talking past each other. The DOD has shown basically no interest in reducing its emissions beyond token greenwashing

If NPR and NYT had countless puffy chats with Exxon about how it takes climate seriously without acknowledging the elephant in the room that they are a large player driving the crisis we would consider this absurd. But the pentagon gets this treatment in 100s of outlets each year

One obvious, simple way the DOD could radically reduce its emissions would be to *reduce its size and reach*. The US military emits more greenhouse gases than the entire economies of Sweden, Denmark and Portugal, for example. But this, mysteriously, is never offered as an option

Sources and more reading here watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…

The Pentagon knows that any sober reading of US greenhouse gas emissions would put them square on the chopping block. Knowing this they’ve actively worked for 20 years to get ahead of this and offer themselves as a SOLUTION, just as oil company PR efforts have done.

And it’s mostly worked. They remain vague and speak a lot about shoring of defenses for climate migration which, again, has NOTHING to do with curbing much less reversing climate change. It’s about removing unwanted populations and weather proofing military bases

This is largely because the US military is seen as “essential” which is obviously not true when put into context of other militaries. Even the most liberal imperialist reading of their scope in charge knows they could reduce by 30% with little impact on “American security”

But this is simply not an option so instead we get more solar panels on Guantanamo and a bunch of dystopian promises about how the DOD will make sure starving climate refugees from Honduras dont make their way to the Phoenix suburb strip malls and interrupt your meal at PF Changs