The military-industrial complex’s vast carbon footprint is deliberately hidden from public view, while we get gaslit into using paper straws.

Gaza was supposed to be our nadir. A horrific, isolated eruption of warfare’s most satanic ethos — the annihilation of the other — showing its true face to the world. Instead, the scale and persistence of Gaza’s destruction risks becoming normalised, just another data point in humanity’s catastrophic descent into ethnically and religiously motivated violence. As Israel and the  United States’ recent unprovoked  attack on Iran demonstrates, we live in an era of escalating wars, where international laws are ignored, violence is institutionalised and diplomacy is increasingly cast aside as an obstacle to the economic objectives of the global war industry.

At the heart of this nightmare is the old Western world, desperate to retain ill-gotten privileges and hegemony, even as a multipolar order takes shape. Their inability to reconcile with a fairer global landscape drives them to lash out – and the whole world pays the price.

The proliferation of digital media has inundated us with an endless loop of mutilated bodies and bombed-out hospitals, numbing us to the suffering. On social media, mourning war’s victims is both common and curiously performative; yet we must not deny the horrifying ease with which violence has become background noise for our coffee breaks. Thoughts and prayers trend, but distractions follow in the next instant.

For those living through conflict, suffering extends far beyond bullets and bombs. In Gaza today,  starvation is weaponised. Children are orphaned and forced to breathe toxic smoke from burning oil refineries; farmers till land riddled with depleted uranium; generations are condemned to water poisoned by munitions and chemicals. War is not a finite event. Its devastation ripples on, bringing slow-motion environmental ruin that haunts communities long after the guns fall silent.

Tragically, contemporary climate debates are reduced to corporate slogans, “net zero” fairy tales and performative guilt over individual carbon footprints. Western leaders feign concern for islands at risk of submersion even as they ignore the military-industrial complex’s colossal environmental and climate damage. The machines of destruction roll on, enriching the merchants of death with every bomb manufactured, sold and detonated.

The global war industry profits directly as innocents pay the ultimate price, the environment is devastated and future generations inherit a toxic world. The systematic exclusion of military emissions from “environmental, social and governance” reporting is not mere negligence; it is deliberate complicity, orchestrated by powerful capital market actors closely linked to the war industry. The public is kept in the dark. This is not just a blind spot; it is a calculated deception.

Loopholes and hypocrisy

Let’s not pretend the ESG industry is a reluctant accomplice. It is designed to distract from the war industry’s role, obsessing over the impact of coffee cups while ignoring militaries’ unchecked consumption of fossil fuels and the destruction of cities. The greatest climate criminals wear suits, not uniforms, yet no UN summit dares challenge them.

A few weeks ago the Global Institute for Tomorrow hosted a groundbreaking virtual conference, “The War on Climate: Unveiling the Uncounted Costs of Conflict”, exposing the deliberate exclusion of conflict emissions by the military-industrial complex, often aided by governments too captive to resist.

As nations ramp up military budgets, it becomes clear that the world is preparing not for peace, but for more conflict, in a damning indictment of systemic failures and warped priorities. Rare moments of global co-operation, such as the Kyoto Protocol, have been undermined by cynical loopholes. The US insisted on exempting military emissions from the agreement. Thus, one of the most carbon-intensive activities on Earth was given a free pass.

The result? Emissions continue to rise,  along with global temperatures. When it comes to military emissions, only a handful of countries even attempt to report them; of these, only  Germany has done so with any rigour. But that may change soon as it vastly increases military spending and becomes more active in wars. The rest mostly fudge, obscure, or ignore the numbers. The same nations that dominate climate summits spend 30 times more on their militaries than on climate action – a telling glimpse of their true priorities.

International bodies like the UN aid and abet this duplicity. Military emissions are often misclassified as those from “bunker fuels” – a technicality that excludes them from national tallies. Worse still, under current reporting, if one nation bombs another, the emissions are counted against the victim, not the aggressor. Such sleight of hand reveals the calculated hypocrisy behind the global military build-up.

These manipulations matter. Officially, military activities account for 6% of global emissions, or a staggering 2.53 billion tonnes per year. This figure dwarfs the emissions of entire continents: military emissions exceed Russia’s or even Africa’s total output. One US Abrams tank burns a year’s worth of car fuel in a single day. Meanwhile, citizens are gaslit into using paper straws, their carbon savings a rounding error next to the military’s unchecked pollution.

The reality is likely far worse. Dr Soroush Abolfathi, a panellist at the Global Institute for Tomorrow conference, estimates that actual conflict emissions could be 10 times higher, contributing 15-20% of global emissions. Yet ESG institutions and the UN erase this from climate policy. That’s not an oversight; it’s collusion with ecocide.

The myth that military emissions begin and end with active conflict is dangerous fiction. Preparation for war — building bases, moving equipment, maintaining fleets — leaves a vast carbon footprint. The US operates more than 750 military bases worldwide, yet reports none of their emissions. Its “war on terror” has produced more CO₂ annually than Sweden or Norway combined. Even after the bombs stop falling, the reconstruction pumps even more carbon into the atmosphere – 16 billion tonnes, mostly from cement, ensuring war’s toxic legacy lingers for generations.

No justice without peace

To treat lofty net-zero targets and peace as separate aspirations would be a fatal error. The military’s contribution to climate change will only amplify the crisis’ worst effects. History shows that those with power and resources will adapt; the marginalised will be displaced, stripped of assets and forced to migrate. Climate migration is no longer a hypothetical – it is a present reality. Peace and climate justice are inseparable from the fight against poverty and inequality.

While the world obsesses over individual carbon footprints, militaries — the elephant in the climate room — operate in the shadows, protected by the very institutions that have been charged with saving our planet. We must demand transparent reporting, genuine accountability for conflict emissions and a redirection of military spending towards climate resilience.

It’s high time these so-called defence forces actually defended something worth protecting: our collective future, not just lines on a map. Because what good are borders on a burning planet?

Republished from South China Morning Post, 9 August 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.