Massive Emissions

We already knew that the bestseller of Lockheed Martin, the F-35, with its “sound of freedom,” is a true carbon bomb. It consumes 2.37 gallons of jet fuel per mile: a staggering 1,340 gallons for every hour of flight time. From fully filled up to running on empty, the F-35 releases a staggering 28 metric tons of carbon. To compare: you could take your gasoline-fueled car to commute from The Hague to Rotterdam every day for twenty-eight years (!) on that carbon budget.

We also already knew that if you added up the carbon emissions of all militaries worldwide, you would be facing the fourth-largest global emitter, after China, the United States, and India.

Last month, a new climate report was published that poignantly revealed how strikingly the current security panic of the European NATO members is at odds with the EU’s green ambitions as set out in its “Green Deal.” Commissioned by the United Nations, a consortium of climate scientists from multiple European universities has calculated the carbon footprint of soaring defense spending since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The EU ratcheted up its military spending by more than a third between 2021 and 2024 — while already having spent a whopping $3.15 trillion (in 2024 dollars) between 1989 and 2020, as historian Adam Tooze recently showed in the Financial Times. Currently, the twenty-seven EU member states spend $377 billion annually on their militaries.

Every percentage point more boils down to an extra annual $206 billion. If they complied with the call to spend 5 percent of GDP in this way, a colossal $1.1 trillion will go to defense, more than the member states annually spend on education, the third-largest item on the budget, and even more than the United States currently spends on defense.

The report stresses that the environmental effects will be huge. This is only to mention carbon emissions, not other types of emissions or other forms of environmental destruction for which data are less readily available.

Austerity

The first type of costs identified by the report are so-called “opportunity costs.” In a context of budget constraints — global public debt over two decades of crises has jumped from $22 trillion in 2002 to $92 trillion in 2022 — every dollar can be spent only once. The hope that this could become a new growth strategy in the form of “military Keynesianism” is misplaced. Money spent on weaponry has proven to leak away to shareholders abroad since weapons production is capital intensive and labor-light. A much better way to boost domestic growth, economists concur, is spending on public services and renewables.

The implication is a zero-sum universe where every dollar that is spent on tanks or ammo can’t be spent on solar panels, heat pumps, insulation, and public transport for the many. It is a truth already powerfully expressed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, no less, a few months before the end of the Korean War: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

According to the report, politicians are already in the business of doing these types of trade-offs. They point to countries like France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, where higher defense spending has been absorbed by cuts to development aid for the Global South, much of it earmarked for climate adaptation. This could well sound the death knell for any attempt at global climate action.

There is a good chance that the trade-offs will not stop there but may result in a second wave of austerity to reduce social spending. Take the Netherlands. There, ahead of new elections this fall, NATO chief Mark Rutte’s own former party is looking at cutbacks on poverty relief — as per this conservative outfit’s long-standing intentions — to fund defense spending.

The Dutch Green-Left (together with Labor, forming the country’s main broad-left alliance), promises to declare social spending sacrosanct, and instead find new sources of income through higher tax rates for the rich. Yet this smacks of cheap political rhetoric in light of the sheer amount of new funding required: €15 billion on an annual budget of €457 billion. And of course, the Left’s complicity during the earlier wave of austerity, at the time of the euro crisis, doesn’t bode well.

This is the sort of political game that will play out in all other EU member states, with the average voter sure to foot the bill.

But most of the environmental costs, the report makes clear, are incurred by the massive material intensity of the production of weaponry (steel, rubber, aluminum) and the equally massive amounts of fossil fuels that its usage requires. The rule of thumb here is that every extra percentage point of defense spending results in one to two percentage points of extra emissions. For NATO as a whole that implies extra emissions of between 87 and 194 million metric tons annually.

If You Want Peace, Prepare for It

Given the iron law of escalation, this is sure to result in corresponding increases in defense spending also elsewhere, notably in China and Russia, with related increases in emissions. In that scenario, according to the authors, the current emission pathway, leading to a 2.7 degrees increase in global average temperatures by 2100, may well prove far too optimistic.

These figures relate to “normal” day-to-day usage of weaponry: training, practicing, maintenance, exercises, etc. The environmental damage it causes when it is used for what it was designed for — destroying the infrastructure of the enemy, killing its soldiers, wrecking its weapons — is a multiple of this. The authors make no secret of the fact that war is an unmitigated ecological disaster. Three years of warfare in Ukraine has caused the equivalent of the annual emissions of Austria, Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia put together. And this is without counting the massive emissions released during reconstruction, once the shooting has stopped. Even apart from the vast, direct human death toll, two years of Israeli massacres in Gaza have done more climate damage than large countries like Zimbabwe (with 16.5 million people) or Afghanistan (41 million) do annually.

The argument that this is a price we simply have to pay, for everything ultimately depends on geopolitical security — an argument that is frequently used by the green-left — is powerfully debunked by the report as well. First, by demonstrating that making more weapons is not the road to security. The cliché that you have to prepare for war if you want peace is simply not true. Rather, as a recent historical meta study has shown, the reverse is true: engaging in arms races actually increases the chances that geopolitical conflicts will end in war.

The run-up to World War I is a prime example, as well as the many hot wars in the Global South waged by vassals of the superpowers during the Cold War. The peace resulting from an arms race is much more brittle than the peace resulting from strategic empathy, as Richard Sakwa powerfully argues in his book Lost Peace.

We could add that the European member states of NATO, even without the United States’ overflowing arsenals, already possess more weaponry and soldiers than Russia. Or that the threat ascribed to Russia by Europe’s security establishment does not match Russia’s proven military capacity (as demonstrated by its slow and cumbersome capture of Eastern Ukraine) and is at odds with the much more sober assessment by their American counterparts who don’t expect an imminent Russian incursion onto NATO territory. This leaves us with the question of why European leaders have jumped so enthusiastically on the militarization bandwagon.

This is especially contradictory in the case of Greens. Not only because of the ease with which they seem to have shelved their earlier ecological commitments but also because the parties that they lead have a long history of pacifism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism. Some of their programs, for instance the Dutch Greens’, had until the late 1990s called to exit from or disband NATO.

One striking case is the current leader of the Dutch alliance of Labor and the Greens, Frans Timmermans. Not only did he serve between 2019 and 2023 as the EU’s climate czar — earning kudos for successfully steering the European Green Deal through the EU parliament — but as leader of the Dutch Green-Left, in October 2023 he called upon his European colleagues to join forces against the “greenlash” from so-called populists. “Frans Timmermans urges European left to unite against right’s climate backlash” was the title; “Dutch politician and former EU deputy criticizes ‘astonishing’ policy U-turns by countries including UK,” was the subtitle.

Fast-forward to March 2025 and we see the same politician, again in the pages of the Guardian, making a completely different claim. In an op-ed, he used the same alarming language, but for a different cause. Now, to plea for Eurobonds, to boost the European defense industry, help Ukraine, and stop the Russian threat in its tracks. “Europe can’t just hope for the best with [Donald] Trump. Ukraine needs all the arms we can send,” was the heading this time. It resonated with similar calls for militarization from the German and French Greens.

How strong are the Greens’ commitments if trumped-up security concerns can so easily sway nominally left-wing Green leaders into backing the financial interests of the European and US defense industry? And how secure is the fate of future generations and the planet in the hands of such politicians?

Those are the questions that are so pressingly thrown up by this new report.

Is a bit more prudence, a tad more hesitation, and a driblet of skepticism not in order here, before they commit citizens to a massive public subsidy for the shareholders of Lockheed Martin, Rheinmetall, and Leonardo?