The Department of Defense spews so much greenhouse gas every year that it would rank as the 55th worst polluter in the world if it were a country, beating out Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, according to a new paper from Brown University’s Costs of War project. The U.S. military emitted a whopping 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 between 2001 (when it invaded Afghanistan) and 2017, according to the report’s estimates. That’s about as much as all of Japan emits in one year. From Department of Energy data it found that Pentagon consistently makes up 77 to 80 percent of the entire U.S. government’s greenhouse gas emissions.
— source grist.org | Jun 12, 2019