35. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, August 18, 2021
FROM PENTAGON
AND MILITARY CONTRACTORS TO WARS AND CATASTROPHIC WARMING TO EXTINCTIONS AND
REFUGEES
The
Pentagon’s polluting pet projects
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Dick — One of the most urgent
updates to climate science in nearly a decade is a brutal indictment of our
failure to act. The UN says it’s a “code
red for humanity.”
But from heat waves
literally melting power cables and triple-digit temperatures in the Arctic, to out-of-control
wildfires in California and Greece — there is one mega-polluter that
rarely makes the headlines: the Pentagon.
The U.S. military is
the largest institutional consumer of petroleum. It emits more
greenhouse gases than 100 countries combined. Just one of the military’s
jets, the B-52 Stratofortress, consumes about as much fuel in an hour as the
average car driver uses in seven years.
But whenever the
climate spotlight lands on the U.S. military, it is used as yet another excuse
to increase defense spending, instead of the no-brainer that we
need to stop spending on the Pentagon’s polluting pet projects and start
spending more on tackling climate change.
Just last week, we piled in to help block a sneaky and absurd attempt to ADD
$50 billion more for the Pentagon in the infrastructure bill. But
we won and forced that back door closed, so now hawks and weapons manufacturers
are pushing to pile this massive increase into the already sky-high $750
BILLION National Defense Authorization Act. It’s appalling. That’s why
we’re teaming up with a small, but powerful, cohort of lawmakers and partners
to stop them — and you can help:
This week’s report by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear we're on the
brink of a mass extinction of species and widespread human suffering, with the worst impacts already hitting
poorer countries and vulnerable communities in the United States and other
wealthy nations.
That means huge
consequences for human dignity here at home and around the world, where the
second order effects — like increased
forced displacement and migration of people seeking refuge — will increase
exponentially.
TWO YEARS AGO, an
internal report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) found that the
overwhelming reason behind the record migration from Guatemala – that continues today – was due to a crop shortage that
left people impoverished and starving.
Like the IPCC report,
the CBP report should have been a Code Red alert, driving
a fundamental reallocation of our country’s resources toward stopping climate
change and supporting the world’s most vulnerable. But surprise
surprise: it’s instead been used as yet another excuse to double-down on
padding defense contractors profits and prioritize corporate greed
over the safety of the world’s poor and hungry.
This misallocation of
priorities and resources is the exact same problem we told you about last week,
when we wrote about the pilot Pentagon program, FireGuard. The reality
is, this misallocation won’t go away unless we double-down as fast as
possible.
Because here’s the thing: ending the
role of militarism in the climate crisis is an emerging area of work for
Win Without War and we can’t pivot and expand without your support. It’s
a lot easier for us to go hard when we don’t have to worry about hitting
fundraising goals, and right now we’ve got a gap to cover. That’s why I’m
asking:
Every fraction of a
degree of heating we avoid matters, saving human lives and protecting
ecosystems. There is much we have lost, but there is much we can save.
Thank you for working
for peace,
Kate, Michael, Shayna,
and the Win Without War team
© Win Without War 2020
1 Thomas Circle NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005
(202) 656-4999 | info@winwithoutwar.org
WAR
AND WARMING
Stop
Excluding Military Pollution from Climate Agreements. From World Beyond War. 7-23-21.
Target: Participants in COP26 UN Climate Change
Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, November 1-12, 2021
We encourage individuals
and organizations to sign the petition below, and also ask organizations to
sign a similar petition created by Conflict and Environment Observatory here. Organizations that are interested in
cosponsoring this petition through Action Network can see how that would
work here and contact us here.
We encourage groups
and individuals to organize events to advance this message on or about the
International Day of Peace during Climate Week, September 21, 2021,
as well as on or about the big day of action in Glasgow on November 4,
2021. Resources and ideas for events are here.
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