Who is killing the world? Many would blame large corporations such as Rio Tinto, Adani and BP for the climate crisis, and this larger cultural distrust of corporations is necessary and vital for recognizing what practices are causing climate change and how to stop them.
However, what role do western countries’ militaries (The Australian Defense Force in particular) have in ushering in the apocalypse?
As of 2019 – Australia places on the lower end of emissions being produced by major world powers in the west, with about 1% of global emissions being produced domestically. This is still 0.38 metric gigatons of combustible fuel being used.
On the surface, Australia’s emissions reports are clean, tidy, and accurate to scientific consensus – but there is one glaring omission to the numbers that makes Australia’s role in the climate crisis far more obscure, and potentially terrible.
How does Australia’s military factor into the country’s emissions?
This is a more complicated question than it initially appears as the ADF is not legally required to release information on their emissions as per the Paris Agreement allowing member countries to exempt their military emissions.
The ADF did however release their emissions from fuel use in the National Inventory Report 2017, where, in Table 3.1 of section 3, the report states that the ADF was only responsible for 961 tonnes of C02 emissions.
These numbers are uninspiring and potentially compromised, due to both the cover provided by the Paris Agreement loophole and due to scientific estimates that world militaries produce about 6% total of all carbon emissions.
There are questions we should ask over the potential use of legal international loopholes. The US Military (Australia’s largest international ally in terms of politics and pollution) was responsible for potentially emitting 205 million tonnes of C02, with the official number reported by the DoD only rounding to 56 million.
There is precedent for large western countries’ militaries being potentially dishonest about their emissions. Australia is no different and this is something everyone should be critical about. Climate change is the single greatest enemy of the 21st century, and we should be far more critical of how nations and their militaries are worsening what is very likely to create devastation akin to the apocalypses of fiction.
