Fight climate change, not wars: bring the troops home

Wars hog money that could be spent helping countries adapt to climate change. But they do more than that, because they are themselves major sources of greenhouse gasses.

When we choose to go to war, that choice means money is no longer available for other things, such as clean energy or funding for communities vulnerable to climate impacts around the world. And the war itself, with all its planes, trucks, missiles, and ships, emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases--that no one tracks.

Fighting wars is mind-bendingly expensive, exceeding the costs of even the bank bailout money. Some key figures:

• Projected Total Cost Iraq War: at least $3 trillion
• Total Obama Admin (FY2010) Defense Budget request: $687 billion
• Additional amount estimated for Obama's Afghan surge: $40 billion

The fact that the Obama administration has already chosen to invest further in war has a rather steep opportunity cost, in addition to its actual cost.

The money that has been spent this decade by the American taxpayer on war could instead, had we wanted it to, have funded all the needed global investments in clean energy from now to 2030.

The sums discussed in Copenhagen are actually much more modest than the trillions spent recently on war. The United Nations recently estimated that $500 billion would be needed (from all the developed world – not just the US) to help build a global clean energy economy and to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Oxfam puts it at $200 billion.

Sadly, even these sums aren't on the table. There is an ongoing discussion of just $10 billion in so-called "fast track funding", and of that, the US has pledged "its fair share". Jonathan Pershing, Obama's Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, seems to be arguing that this is only $1.5 billion.

That's right, that would be half of what the Administration just gave Exxon, and a fraction of its ongoing subsidies to fossil fuels.

Emissions from war are more difficult to quantify. On the fifth anniversary of the war, Oil Change International published A Climate of War, a report that quantified the emissions of the war from March 2003 through until December 2007. We used very conservative estimates and left many things out when we couldn't get reliable numbers, and still the number was staggering.

The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. To put that into perspective, if the US military operations in Iraq were ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world's nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war emits more than 60% of all countries.

All these emissions need to be counted, because the atmosphere doesn't care if you're looking for weapons of mass destruction or terrorists, or even fighting the good fight (not that we've seen much of that recently). These are currently completely uncounted emissions. It's a loophole big enough to drive a tank through.

So while President Obama is receiving his Peace Prize for whatever it is he might do someday on climate change, perhaps someone should ask if the emissions from the Afghan surge will swamp the meager reductions that the US has on the table in Copenhagen. But that's not really a politically convenient question, now is it?