At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, President Donald Trump’s wish for members to spend 5 percent of GDP on the military is widely expected to be agreed. The splurge comes as a group of sixty climate scientists has reported alarming news about our planet. At the current rate, they tell us the remaining carbon budget for keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be consumed in just two years’ time. Forget the Paris Agreement: humanity is now on course to an average temperature rise of 2.7 degrees by 2100.
This raises important questions about our political leaders’ commitment on the climate — especially those from nominally progressive and ecologist parties. In fact, politicians like Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, representing the German Greens, have been among the loudest cheerleaders of their country’s rearmament. The doyen of the European Green political family, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, has similarly been pressing EU governments to ramp up spending on weapons.
But how green is war and the war prepping that NATO calls for?
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…
Auteur: Ewald Engelen
