- The House of Representatives in July passed a nearly $850 billion defense budget for 2023.
- In debates about defense spending and foreign policy, Democrats have failed to deliver on climate.
In the coming weeks, Congress will be sending President Joe Biden the final version of the National Defense Authorization for Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23 NDAA).
While we will continue to hear national security debates involving China, Ukraine, and defense strategy, one major policy aspect of the NDAA conversation will be missing: climate.
When Democrats pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, its landmark climate provisions showed the strength of the climate consensus on domestic policy. The depth and scope of the IRA's approach to confronting climate change is unparalleled.
However, when it comes to the FY23 NDAA and larger foreign policy debates, Democrats fail to deliver on climate.
One jarring and emblematic climate casualty in FY23 NDAA was an amendment by Rep. Bill Keating directing the State Department to establish and staff climate officers at US diplomatic posts all around the world, as well as establishing a curriculum so that new diplomats can receive specialized climate training.
These officers would carry out climate diplomacy around the world by engaging with countries, facilitating bilateral and multilateral cooperation, helping provide expertise, strategizing mitigation strategies, and more.
The amendment failed 208-217 due to key Democratic defections — a bizarre hodgepodge coalition consisting of Reps. Angie Craig, Jared Golden, Jim Himes, Kurt Schrader, Elissa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, Greg Stanton, and Susan Wild.
This amendment by Keating does not even come close to addressing the climate cost of the US military and the military industrial complex. It was simply a small investment in diplomacy to confront a global crisis.
The annual NDAA is fundamentally a climate bill — 56% of the federal government's carbon footprint actually comes from the US military and a significant chunk of global greenhouse gas emissions are produced by our militaristic foreign policy. Yet 180 House Democrats voted for the bill, which expanded our budget for conducting a polluting, militaristic foreign policy to nearly $850 billion.
Democrats consistently fail to draw the connection between how our militarized foreign policy and the military-industrial complex at home fuel the climate crisis. US foreign policy, militarism, and climate policy must go together.
The US military generates more greenhouse gasses than 140 countries. That makes the US military one of the biggest polluters on the planet.
The national security community is acutely aware of the effects of climate change — they've been thinking, planning, and gaming out scenarios since the late 2000s. But their focus has never been on reducing emissions but rather adapting to fighting wars in a climate-changed world.
Efforts to reduce emissions from the Defense Department extend only toward electrifying non-tactical vehicles and transitioning to net-zero carbon electricity generation for military bases. In other words, the SUVs and the sedans the military buys will be electric, but the F-35 fighter jet will still burn 22 gallons of jet fuel per minute — a whopping 1,340 gallons of jet fuel per hour.
That is, of course, if the F-35 manages to get in the air in the first place. Despite $1.7 trillion in overall cost, almost 9% of the F-35s don't fly due to engine problems.
But we struggle to eliminate the jet program because 47 out of the 50 states have F-35 related-facilities. To take on the failed jet program means risking all these carbon-intensive jobs strategically spread across the entire country by Lockheed Martin. When in reality, long-term economic research clearly shows cutting just $125 billion in excess military spending and reinvesting in green manufacturing could create 250,000 jobs.
The IRA has given us the framework for a new domestic industrial policy to combat the climate crisis, but it doesn't go far enough.
The carbon footprint of the US military and the extensive carbon-intensive industry which supports it is too great to ignore. Right now, the planet is on a trajectory to warm between 2°C and 3°C, almost double the temperature limits of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.
Extreme weather patterns are now the norm and not the exception. Earlier this year, one-fifth of the total human population living in South Asia suffered through an extended severe drought with sustained temperatures upward of 120°F or 48.8°C. Now that drought has given way to a deluge of monsoon floods. And here at home, California is melting under a sweltering heat wave while Jackson floods from a torrential downpour.
Climate change ripples to food insecurity, economic distress, and eventually political instability, violence, and forced migration. We're already seeing it happen all over the world — the future is here.
The transformative change we need in our foreign climate policy priorities requires political will from our elected leaders in Congress and the White House, the same kind of political will that passed the IRA. And Democrats can start by talking about the amount of greenhouse gasses the military emits. Right now, we're only addressing half of the equation.
Yint Hmu is a senior email writer at Win Without War.