Neta Crawford on the Pentagon, Climate Change, and War
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
The United States military was one of the first institutions in government to acknowledge the threat posed by climate change, as well as the science behind it, and yet it remains the largest single energy consumer in the country and the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter in the world. To talk through this strategic disconnect, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Dr. Neta Crawford, Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Oxford, co-director of the Costs of War study at Brown University, and author of the new book, “The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions.” They discussed what Dr. Crawford calls the irony and tragedy of the military's carbon emissions, how war drives emissions and industrialization, and why climate activists may be skeptical about framing climate as a security issue.
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Transcript
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | And what the military will do if told is to rethink its force posture, |
| 0:40.0 | not just to reduce emissions and installations and, I mean, a by switching fuels, |
| 0:46.0 | but to ask ourselves, do we need those bases at all? |
| 0:49.0 | Do we need those forward, located forces at all? |
| 0:55.0 | And if we don't, for instance in the Persian Gulf, can we close them? |
| 1:01.0 | What is the risk if we do? |
| 1:04.0 | Is it low or is the certainty of climate change low? |
| 1:09.0 | Well, the certainty of climate change is high, |
| 1:12.0 | and the risk in many of these war zones of war is low. |
| 1:16.0 | And we have the capacity given the United States ability to project power |
| 1:21.0 | with its existing forces to get to a war zone relatively rapidly. |
| 1:27.0 | It's not that we have to be everywhere all the time. |
| 1:31.0 | I'm Tyler McBride, managing editor of LawFair. |
| 1:35.0 | And this is the LawFair podcast, November 29th, 2022. |
| 1:39.0 | The United States military was one of the first institutions in government |
| 1:42.0 | to acknowledge the threat posed by climate change, as well as the science behind it. |
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