Donald Trump has added American warmaking prowess to the list of things he claims President Joe Biden’s climate policies will undermine, writes Scott Waldman. Biden’s appointees “want to make our Army tanks all electric so that when we go into a foreign country, blazing hot, we’re going in, we keep their environment and their air nice and clean,” the former president said at a rally in Wisconsin. “Now how crazy is it?” Trump has spent months attacking the Biden administration over the military’s plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, continuing a line of GOP attacks on Pentagon climate efforts since at least the Obama era. His claims have at times dipped into absurd imagery — such as when he insisted that the Army was moving toward deploying all-electric tanks, which would have to tow huge batteries “like a child” pulling a wagon. (No such plans are in the works, according to the nonpartisan site FactCheck.org.) But national security experts and climate scientists say curbing the military’s planet-warming pollution is crucial. Even during Trump’s presidency, the Pentagon was taking steps to fortify its installations against climate change and reduce its carbon emissions. War and climate change are linked in more ways than one. As military emissions help warm the planet, weather is becoming more extreme, seas are rising, and water is running dry in some places. That is leading to food scarcity and forced migration — a perfect storm for the kind of political instability that leads to terrorism and war, as the Defense Department has been warning for years. In other words, greening military operations can help reduce the threat of war in the first place. The world’s militaries are responsible for a considerable amount of global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, if all the world’s militaries were a country, it would have the fourth-largest carbon footprint — “a proportion so great that it can no longer be ignored,” according to a 2022 report by the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory. The first two years of Russia’s war with Ukraine, for example, produced at least 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, a network of scientists investigating the climate impacts of Russia’s war. That’s the equivalent of about $32 billion in damages, they say. The first 60 days of Israel’s war on Gaza created more than 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide because of aircraft, tanks, rockets and artillery, a recent study found. The Defense Department therefore calls climate change a “threat multiplier.” As part of its response, the U.S. Army plans to deploy fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050 while focused on its primary mission “to deploy, fight, and win the nation’s wars.” In some instances, curbing carbon emissions is inherently advantageous. For example, the U.S. military has deployed electric light reconnaissance vehicles, which are quieter than internal combustion engine-powered ones and have no heat signature, making them harder to target.
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