climate leadership

“As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership. She and Governor Walz will always fight for the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” Right.

In November, the next annual world climate summit, COP 29, will take place in the Azerbaijani capital Baku to take stock and decide on new measures against global warming. However, military pollution of the atmosphere remains excluded from the discussion, since the US successfully prevented this in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. To illustrate just one aspect of the US’ international climate leadership, I translated and slightly edited a short article from the German newspaper junge Welt (5/6 October 2024).

« One of the first studies to uncover direct and indirect emissions as a result of the war on terror was conducted by Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, Kirsti Ashworth and Reuben Larbi and published in the journal Nature in 2022. The authors also examined the use of concrete walls by the U.S. military in Baghdad during the first five years of George Bush’s ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, launched in 2003, to measure the war’s carbon footprint. “From an environmental point of view, there is no such thing as ‘green’ military technology,” they say. The hundreds of miles of “concrete militarization has an extraordinary carbon footprint.”

Building on the article in Nature, Neimark and Larbi, together with Patrick Bigger and Frederick Otu-Larbi, also examined in a new study the “huge effect of the emissions from the US-backed Israeli genocide on the climate crisis”. Their research, a “multitemporal snapshot,” only covers the first two months of the war and yielded alarming results: “The planet-warming emissions exceeded the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries.” Specifically, 99 percent of the calculated 281,000 tons of carbon dioxide resulted from the bombing of Gaza by Israel (121,000 tons) and from US cargo flights with military supplies for the occupation forces (133,650 tons). The bombs dropped accounted for 6,689 tons and Israeli artillery for 13,600 tons, while Hamas rockets blew 713 tons of CO2 into the air. A total of 450,000 tons of CO2 were calculated for the military infrastructure, Hamas tunnel construction and the Israeli ‘Iron Wall’, while for the reconstruction of Gaza’s destroyed buildings one estimates some thirty million tons of greenhouse gases – as much as New Zealand emits into the atmosphere in a year. These studies, which the authors say need to be expanded, only cover the first two months of this so-called war. »

Expectations can’t of course be anything but high when it comes to Harris’ and Walz’ international climate leadership. But, just sticking to destruction from the air, don’t forget also the attacks on Lebanon, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Turkish bombs on the Kurds in Syria, the ongoing genocide in Sudan/Darfur, war misery and devastation everywhere. Which means worldwide pollution, in other words. One would begin to doubt the point of separate garbage collection.