Making the connection between militarism and climate chnage.

Marjorie Cohn certainly does.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/13/us-militarism-a-lead-driver-of-climate-catastrophe/

Oh this is interesting -

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men committed suicide and took roughly 3,000 people with them by flying two airliners into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania.

None of the hijackers hailed from Afghanistan or Iraq; 15 came from Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the Bush administration illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and overthrew their governments, then killed, injured and tortured nearly three-quarters of a million of their people.

Beyond the terrible death tolls in both countries, a lesser known consequence of the “war on terror” was the exacerbation of the climate catastrophe, both in the countries targeted by the war and globally.

Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol excluded military emissions from the counting of national emissions figures, U.S. military emissions are significantly undercounted. Although militaries are a significant source of carbon emissions, little is understood about their carbon footprint.

One of the first studies to expose direct and indirect military emissions as a result of combat was conducted by Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, Kirsti Ashworth and Reuben Larbi.

They examined the use of concrete “blast walls” by U.S. forces in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003-2008, the first five years of Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” to measure the carbon footprint of the war. Concrete walls and barriers were also used in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2008-2012 during “Operation Enduring Freedom.” (Although these two wars did not bring freedom, their effects on the climate crisis are enduring.)

While occupying Baghdad, the U.S. military erected hundreds of miles of blast walls in order to control the urban population pursuant to its counterinsurgency strategy. “Effective weaponisation of concrete has an extraordinary carbon footprint,” Neimark, Belcher, Ashworth and Larbi wrote.

“The large carbon footprint comes mainly from the amount of heat and energy in cement production, the main ingredient in concrete.”