Book Review: The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions
Neta L. Crawford, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions (MIT Press, 2022).
It is hard to imagine a book more worthy of being included in the core curriculum of every college or university, or, perhaps, the one required of all first-year students before they trundle onto campus. Neta Crawford’s The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions (MIT Press, 2022) addresses the main “existential threats” to the United States and the world. Both climate change and war – and the strategies, alliances, armaments, and sources of energy that go into preparing for and carrying out modern conflicts — are almost impossible — outside of specialized seminars — for those prospective students to find and study as they settle into their dorms and search the catalogue on-line.
Neta Crawford is the rare academic who blends meticulous research and penchant for detail with strategic vision, historical sweep, and political savvy. Crawford began her immersion into the role of the U.S. military and global climate change while looking for information on greenhouse gas emissions for a PowerPoint slide in her interdisciplinary class at Boston University. She soon discovered that the American military is the biggest user of fossil fuels and energy in the U.S. government – about 51 million metric tons each of the last two years – more than most countries in the world.
From there, Crawford, who now teaches at Oxford, became deeply familiar with the military’s efforts to deal with climate change and carbon emissions, which the Pentagon has labeled a “threat multiplier.” Extreme weather events and sea-level rise, for instance, have harmed and threaten U.S. military bases and supply chains, while stirring up the potential for more conflict.
Pensacola Naval Air Station and Eglin Air Force Base, among many examples, have been repeatedly hit, flooded, evacuated, or shut after hurricanes along the Florida panhandle. Now bases across the U.S. are threatened by climate change, as are critical air bases like one on Diego Garcia, a small island off the coast of India, that has been repeatedly inundated.
But even as our armed forces work to reduce their carbon “bootprint” and reliance on fossil fuels, the United States and the Pentagon remain committed to huge armed forces, overseas deployments, and a grand strategy that still includes massive spending to protect and defend sources of fossil fuels around the world.
It is in plumbing this contradiction that Crawford distinguishes herself, linking data from disparate events and eras, in a tour de force of historical analysis of the growth of U.S. dependence on and strategic defense of fossil fuel resources, even after we no longer need them.
Every famous battle, deployment, or invasion involving U.S. forces, it seems, has been fueled by coal and oil as ships transitioned from sails and wood-fueled steam, to coal-fired vessels which extended their speed and range. Admiral Perry in Japan is seeking coaling stations, not just trade. The USS Maine and Cuba, Guantanamo Bay? Same story. During the Civil War, the U.S. sought coaling stations in Honolulu, and later in the 1880s at Pearl Harbor. These and other far-flung coaling stations became strategic and needed protection. An empire was being born.
World War II sealed the strategic importance of oil as FDR, aboard the U.S.S Quincy, made a secret deal for access to oil with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. As the Cold War began, the U.S. soon overthrew governments in Iran and elsewhere, and finally developed a Persian Gulf Doctrine and a Central Command to protect U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East (read oil) at any cost.
But importantly, Crawford does not end without an equally penetrating search for solutions for our strategic and structural stance as a global power defending increasingly outmoded, unnecessary, and harmful fossil fuels. Her brilliant analysis scrutinizes how the United States might begin to tackle climate change as a security threat, reduce carbon emissions, including those already begun by the Pentagon, reduce military spending, and shift resources to renewable, clean energy, and free ourselves from a self-defeating, hugely expensive, and dangerous commitment to the strategic defense of fossil fuels.
Want the most important course you may ever take (or teach) in a single book? Grab The Pentagon, Climate Change and War, pour a glass of port or madeira, and sit down with your very own Oxford don.
—Bob Musil
Dr. Robert K. Musil is the President & CEO of the Rachel Carson Council. He is the author of Hope for a Heated Planet: How Americans Are Fighting Global Warming and Building a Better Future (Rutgers University Press). He is the Treasurer of the Council for a Livable World and the former Director of the Military Affairs Project of the Center for National Security Studies and the SANE Education Fund, and has taught about war and peace, national security, and global climate change at American, Northwestern, Temple, and LaSalle Universities.
