Angry Planet - How Militaries Camouflage Their Carbon Emissions

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Militaries around the world are preparing for climate change. That’s true even in countries where politicians are indifferent to global warming.But what about the emissions being spewed by those militaries themselves?Joining us to talk about that today is Doug Weir. He’s Research and Policy Director, The Conflict and Environment Observatory, and has studied the issue.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. militaries around the world are preparing for climate change. That's true even in countries where politicians are indifferent to global warming, or at least were. But what about the emissions being spewed by those militaries themselves? Joining us to talk about that today is Doug Weir. He's research and policy director at the Conflict and Environmental Observatory. And he's actually studied this issue, which makes him one of very few. you. So welcome to the show. Thanks a lot of having me. How much do we actually know about military greenhouse gas emissions? Yeah. So this has been an interesting process. I think historically, there's been a lot of focus on the US and the US emissions because they're pretty substantial, very substantial. To be fair, what we do know has tended to come from academics who have

tried to figure out what's being emitted. And the main reason that's, the case is that the militaries themselves don't really report their emissions particularly effectively or indeed at all effectively at the moment. But a lot of it is guesswork, really. You can see, for example, one study looked at the US and how much oil and hydrocarbon products the US military gets through every year and then made some assumptions based on that. But honestly, we don't really have a particularly clear handle on the emissions from most militaries around the world. Do we know if this is something the Pentagon is actively looking at? we get these reports from them fairly regularly in the last five years where they say, hey,

you know, climate change is a problem. Here's what we're going to do as, you know, the world starts breaking down. Here's our game plan, et cetera, et cetera. And I believe, like, didn't we come to the idea for this episode, Jason, because in one of the previous conversations with the guest, someone brought up like, hey, has anyone ever looked at what the military emissions are? So does the Pentagon, do we know, I mean, obviously they're not reporting it to us, but does we know if the Pentagon is even studying this thing or even thinking about it? Yes, yes. There are people thinking about it.

There are people doing things and taking action. I have been for quite a while. It has reduced its consumption over the last few years, but it's the question of what's the motivation for doing that? And what we've tended to see from the US is that they're mainly motivated by making them more effective for fighting wars. So it's a question of, okay, we don't have to fill us a tank of lorries full of diesel and shipping forward. operating bases and it can be a tackle on the way, let's get some renewable energy in those forward operating bases instead of relying on diesel generators. And it's that kind of mentality rather than, oh, we're having a massive impact on global climate change. We probably ought to do

something about that. That seems to be changing a little bit, but I think part of the issue we see with not just the US, but militaries around the world is where's the motivation, what's the motivating factor for them to change their behaviours and historically on environmental issues across the board. Militiers enjoy this sense of environmental exceptionalism, that they're kind of outside of the norms and rules which govern rest of society and other sectors. And so there hasn't been the same pressure on them to take action as we've seen on, yeah. I guess it makes sense in the way that the military feels like, well, if you need us, you need us. And if you need us,

you're not going to care what kind of emissions that we're spewing out, I guess. Yeah, to a point. But then it's the question of, well, the militaries themselves are contributing to the security problems that they're trying to deal with. Obviously, you could probably say that for weapons proliferation generally, and there's arguments we had there. But particularly now you've got the U.S. and others, NATO, who we're positioning themselves as leaders on climate security, then there's this question of, you know, if you want to be leaders on this issue, then you really need to start getting your own house in order at the same time. And military vehicles of various kinds are pretty lethal as far as environmental impact, right?

I mean, they use some of the dirtiest fuels and they use them in great abundance. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think it kind of speaks to a wider problem as to why anybody who's expecting massive radical change in emissions overnight is probably going to be disappointed. So when you look at the length of procurement for most military vehicles and for how long they tend to be in service, it's decades. You know, it's not like people changing an iPhone every two years. This is sitting on a main battle tank for 20 years, 30 years. And at the same time, at the moment with our current technology, there's no way of driving that 60-ton main battle tank on electric batteries. These are some of the issues are going to have to sort of accept and work around.

And, yeah, militaries are going to have to come up with some clever solutions. Obviously, the nature of warfare is changing all the time. Maybe there will be changed in relation to that. Until they kind of start accepting this and until there's some external pressure on them to actually start generating these changes and using these vast quantities of money, which has sunk into military R&D and military procurement every year to actually sort of move to more sustainable procurement, then we're not going to see the change we need. But, yeah, it does ultimately come down to this question of how much military are we going to need, how is it going to be? be used. What are the environmental impacts of that? Because it's going to get increasingly less acceptable for them to operate in the way they have been operating because of the international concerns about a changing climate. So we have this big COP6 going on right now, right? Started

yesterday. Do we know if this is something that's even part of the conversations that are happening there? Is this on the agenda? Is this something that anyone's actually talking about at those levels? Yeah. So I guess you probably need to step back a little bit to the Kyoto Protocol. So back in the latter stages of the last century. So in order to get the US on board with the Kyoto Protocol, military's admissions were excluded from reporting under it. And that was one of the key diplomatic asks of the US. There's an interesting congressional meeting the following year where featuring Joe Biden character and John Kerry, I think his name is the current US climate envoy, who is there praising the diplomatic team who had managed to get this

blanket exemption for military emissions. They say, well, you know, he's public servants got a lot of flack, but you guys have really pulled it out, knocked out the park, and it should be, it was an amazing job. And it's like, well, times do change, don't they? But, yeah, because of that kind of set the tone for many years. And then under Paris, military emissions reporting became voluntary. But we see it a lot with these multilateral environmental agreements,

these environmental treaties and processes. The military stuff tends to be excluded. So there's a treaty banning mercury, for example, in order to get the US on board, military applications of mercury had to be excluded from the convention. It turns out you need them in night vision goggles and things. So we see, again, this kind of military exceptionalism story which we see, and it's been the same with the UNFCCC in Paris. So after Paris, military emissions reporting was the intergovernmental panel on climate change,

which kind of sets the standards for how governments should. report to the UNF-Triple-C on what they're doing to reduce their emissions, they do have guidance on how militaries should report. It's not particularly great, and that's something we've been looking at for the last few months, trying to get a kind of overview of what countries actually report to the UNF-T-T-C, because if you're not reporting your emissions, there's no way you're going to cut them, because if nobody knows what you're emitting and you don't know what you're emitting, then you can't even have that conversation about how to reduce them. So historically, we've tended to see military missions excluded from the agenda of the COPP process and COP26 is no different. But this year,

there's been a definite uptick in the number of civil society organizations and campaigners who are flagging this is an issue alongside some of the other stuff, which isn't included at the moment, like aviation. So yeah, there's a lot more attention on it this year than there has been previously, but it's still not on the formal COP agenda, should I say. In a report that your group put out recently, you talk about the major source from militaries of greenhouse gases and it's not combat. Where actually does, you know, this come from? Yeah. So this is the thing. Preconceptions and misconceptions, I suppose, that when we think about militaries, we think about the tanks and the vehicles and stuff, think about the bases. And just in reference to that reporting to the

UN, those are the two categories which can be reported under, so it's mobile fuel use, so for vehicle heat tanks and things, and also stationary fuel use, so heating for military bases. And that's kind of a narrow approach that most people have when thinking about militaries. But actually, I think what we found, and others have found when taking a closer look, is that there's the institutional emissions like that, but then beyond that, there are supply chains in particular. And with most organizations that you look at, military or civilian, it's the supply chains that tend to be, can be three, four, five times larger in terms of emissions than the actual organization itself. And so in the case of the military, you know, it's not just guns, bullets, and

consumables. It's everything to support, you know, those massive numbers of troops. I remember back to Iraq when you had Halliburton and KBR building those huge installations across Iraq and everything And it goes into that from your pizza huts and your Burger Kings to the whole work. So once you take a look at the entire supply chains of these militaries, it tends to radically increase the level of emissions that they're creating. And that's just not being addressed and not being counter at the moment. But then if you take a step beyond that and start looking at, well, do we need to look at the whole lifecycle of the militaries? Obviously, you have the life cycle of weapons from production, through to use, through to disposal, whatever, but also a life cycle of military activities. So do we need to look at conflicts and what happens in conflicts?

Obviously, we see a lot of fires, a lot of devastated, but we also see very significant socio-economic changes in countries, which can then have big influence on some of the carbon sources and some of the carbon sinks. So, an example of those cities that are bombed in Syria, they need to be rebuilt. What's the carbon cost of that, giving the amount of cement that's going to take. You know, it's millions and millions of tons of potentially. And often when we look at peace, we see radical, increases in emissions as well. So if you look at Colombia post-conflict, it's an interesting case that

the FARC were protecting areas of rainforest because they were using them since the conflict has ended, or the peace agreement has been signed at least. There's been this massive upsurge in deforestation from these areas which were previously protected by the presence of the FARC, and that will have a huge impact on Colombia's annual emissions. So we perhaps need to take this kind of wider, a more holistic view of how not just militarism, but also conflicts themselves contribute to generating emissions. So building a bomb is worse for the environment than dropping one? Or is that too simplistic?

Well, which kind of bomb, Jason? Well, okay. Would be my pushback on that. And this is it. It's like how many of those bombs are actually used in conflict? And that's the thing with the U.S. in particular, and certainly the size of a cold war stockpiles in which tend to be held. most of those bombs were never used in training or in active conflict and were made and then disposed of the end of their lives through open burning or demolition.

What's the environmental impact of that? So, yeah, we can't really, we need to kind of step back from that kind of these simplistic approaches to emissions and, yeah, to take this kind of wider, holistic approach, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think nuclear weapons are a pretty instructive way to look at this. Actually, as I'm thinking about it, because you think about in. combat, as part of a war, we only ever dropped two, right? But between the testing and the development, like how many countless people and environments were destroyed? People in the Marshall Islands are still, you know, trying to deal with this. The places where we don't even have places where we can dispose of the stuff because no one wants it in their backyard, right? And the

the legacy of what has become the environment in the American Southwest because of people rushing out there to try to mine uranium and the testing on top of that. I mean, it's, it's, the stuff can be quite devastating and not just because of the use of the weapons. That never, that did not occur to me in this context. I think that's important. Well, I think I, I have to say, though, that it's been proposed. And I mean, seriously, people have proposed using nuclear weapons to create a nuclear winter. thereby counteracting climate change. So you've got to look at both sides.

Good people on both sides. Yeah, I'm not sure to take off. I'm hoping we're past that point of where we can find terribly useful applications for nuclear weapons, like digging canals across the former Soviet Union and other approaches, which, yeah, yeah, that's that crazy mine in eastern Ukraine, the Red October mine, where they wanted to, they had a really bad problem with methane buildups in coal mine.

and they thought letting off a small nuclear device in this mine would somehow remedy this sort of methane issue. And so now you have this huge cavity formed by this nuclear blast, which this area is in eastern Ukraine, current area of the conflict. That's meant that the pumps should be pumping the water out of the mine have now been switched off. And so the water is rising in the mine and now that water is now leaking. And it may well be the case that radio nucleides from this blasts, chamber are now leaking into the environment. So this idiotic idea, which is kind of borne out of nuclear war and Cold War, has then sort of gone full cycle into then becoming an environmental issue in an actual war decades later.

It's almost as if actions have consequences. Do we know if – so you've kind of talked about the logistics of the military being a big contributor. Is there one particular – like, is the Navy worse than the Air Force? Is the Air Force worse than the Army? or do we know? We don't really know because of the state of reporting. There's like some interesting facts out there.

There's about twice as many military aircraft in service and civilian aircraft. Obviously, they're quite different aircraft and they're used in different ways, but yeah, kind of stats like that make you think a little bit. In terms of Navy, yeah, global naval fleets are considerably smaller than merchant fleets. But again, their fuel was bunker fuel generally for shipping is exempted from reporting. That's one of the things with ABA, which is currently exempted from UNFFFCC reporting, and that's something which definitely needs to be addressed. So, yeah, we don't really have a great handle on this.

And obviously, this is kind of a problem that even comparing it between countries is quite different. So you could look at the US force structure as an advanced military, compare it to, say, China, where you have somewhat lower levels of tech, but perhaps more people under arms. And the composition of these militaries varies so much. it actually makes it very difficult to sort of compare evenly. So we were kind of looking at what's being reported by militaries and trying to figure out, is there some kind of standard conversion factor we can apply by saying, well, look, this is how much money they spend every year on their militaries?

Could we multiply it by something to give us a rough back of fag packet estimate around what their emissions would be? But there's so much variation between countries. It makes it really difficult to do so. And then we're pretty short on examples as well. So there's a place like Saudi Arabia, which spends about as much on its military every year as the UK does. That's 8% of GDP for Saudi Arabia. So US is what, fourish.

UK is around 2%. So they're spending a ton of money every year, but they've reported absolutely no data on their military emissions to the UNF, Triple C. So we have no idea what that kind of represents. And interesting, you saw the other day. They were saying, well, we're going to go for Net Zero by 2050. So making this transition. And it's like, well, are you going to include your military emissions? and I'll be interested to see whether that's ever on the agenda for Saudis.

But, yeah, there's just these huge black holes, essentially. You did mention one specific case that I thought was interesting, because you mentioned what happens when a sortie of B2 bombers makes a flight. And you actually calculated how much carbon was put out. And it's not a matter of the number. I'm just wondering, like, I mean, just some sort of perspective. I mean, is it a large amount when, you know, a couple of bombers go out compared to, I don't know, let's say civilian air? Not necessarily.

And I guess you could, as a forthcoming book by Nita Crawford, US professor who's done quite a lot of digging into the US emissions in particular. And she takes quite an interesting approach of sort of generating a per capita figure for the emissions. So on the one hand, you can look at the US military emissions as a whole and say, well, look, that amount places them somewhere between Peru and Portugal if they were a country. So by rights, they should probably have a desk in Glasgow at the COP 26 at the moment, because they're potentially a more influential country than many of the countries who will be represented there in terms of their emissions. At the same time, it's like, well, on the scale of the US emissions as a whole,

that's maybe what 1% of the US's annual emissions. So it's not huge. But then if you look at it on a per capita basis of how much. So if the DOD was a country, how much would every service member and it's a employee? And it's like 2.4 million employees of a DOD. And they would be emitting around 40 tons a year annually. So a Swedish person would emit five tons a year annually. The UK, it's about seven and a half tons a year.

So, yeah, there's different ways of looking at it. But the thing is, we might get argument saying, well, why are you signaling out of the military here? Why are we focusing on the military so much? And it's really because, A, we haven't focused on the military at all and enough historically. B, this is a considerable amount of carbon, particularly compared to most of the countries of the world. And see that unless we start focusing on them, we're not going to get any change. And ultimately, we're going to have to make a decision of, do we actually encourage our militaries to emit less? And if they're not going to emit less, then do other sectors have to emit even less to make room for the military within those carbon budgets?

Do we have to have smaller militaries working in different ways? Can we get those technological developments which are actually going to reduce their emissions? There's a lot of difficult decisions to be made, which probably won't be made satisfactorily, I would imagine. How do you – a big part of this conversation has been – and this is kind of, you know, the nature of military reporting, has been how much of this is a black hole, how much of this is just unknown? How do you study something like this when there are so many unknowns? Yeah. So next week at the COP, we were going to launch a new website, militaryemissions.org. And on there, we have an interactive map. And so we have selected, so the UNF-TCCC, the UN system, it divides up countries into either Annex One countries or non-Annex1 countries. So Annex One countries were the ones back around the time. John Kerry was praising the escape of the US military. from emissions reporting, the countries who were kind of most industrialized. So they're around 40, 44, plus the EU, Annex 1 countries. And they're the ones who have to report every year. They're the

ones who are more industrially developed and who are creating more emissions or have historically created more emissions. So they're ones who have to report every year. So in theory, that should give us an annual report where we can look into it and go, well, this is what they're militaries. In reality, the standard of emissions reporting isn't particularly good in those annual reports. In addition to that, we looked at who are the 55 biggest military spenders every year. And that brought us in a chunk of other states. And these are the non-annex one countries. And those are ones who were sort of developing countries at the time the year who's been negotiated.

But that now includes Saudi Arabia. That now includes Israel, China, India, Pakistan, all of whom have pretty large militaries. It's like China spends this second out of the US every year in military spending. They don't have to report every year in the same way that the Annex I countries do. So on our website, we present what it's around 55 countries are currently reporting. Those are ones who are spending the most on weapons and who have reporting obligations. What we have seen from the Annex 1 countries, so those they've developed countries, we've tried to grade them to see what the quality of reporting is.

and only four countries out of those 44 have reached fair in terms of their reporting, so that they kind of comply with the very low standard being set by the UNFFCC. Of the non-NX-1 countries, absolutely none of them are reporting their military emissions in any kind of meaningful way. For some of them, we don't even have reports like 2014, 2012, 2016. So they're the most up-to-date reports we've got on their emissions. And in their military stuff doesn't tend to be mentioned. China, they report a little bit.

But overall, it's really dire, to be quite honest. And then within the Annex One countries, those who are reporting their emissions every year, there's a huge variety. So these IPCC standards where you're reporting your fuel use or your stationary emissions from your bases, they kind of get aggregated together into a lump, so it doesn't really tell you very much. And they tend to get mixed in with other things like citizen defence, mountain rescue teams, and things. Some countries don't report at all because they don't think militarily should have to report anything. So they've got this huge variety. So again, going back to this question of can you compare between countries?

No, there's very little standardisation. It's not comparable. It's not transparent. It's not open. And there are some who seem to be reporting that wouldn't feel confident saying that it was particularly good or particularly comprehensive and particularly because it only just covers fuel use and heating at bases. It doesn't bring in supply chains or these other emission sources we already talked about.

There's no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. I mean, you're saying it's voluntary. But even for emission reports that are not voluntary, there's still no actual penalties that I can think of. Do you think this is ever going to change? Do you think that there is any way to hold militaries accountable? Well, in theory, they should be held accountable by their governments. How that works in practice.

Yeah. Ultimately, it's up to the public and us, I think, to hold them accountable, to scrutinize them, to make a fuss public opinion. And that's kind of being reflected. I've been working on these issues for quite a long time, not just on military emissions, but around conflict and the environment for quite a while. And you've kind of been conscious of the military emissions debate for many years. And it's actually been interesting in the last sort of year, 18 months.

You've had a real sort of optic in attention and interest from NATO, for example. So last June, NATO had made a big fuss that they were going to be pivoting to climate security, climate security in China. That was kind of the outcome of their summit thing. And they also were going to start looking at their emissions. And there's a lot of buildup in this, a lot of coverage, Washington Post elsewhere, lots of Jens Stoltenberg, Directorate General of NATO, former Norwegian Environment Minister, he's pretty seized of this matter.

And you're like giving a lot of attention. The actual summit outcome wasn't quite what we were hoping for. It was like NATO itself will start to sort out some of this, start to look at some of its emissions. NATO members, we will make sense. significant, badly determined or ill-determined cuts to something or other by some point in the future, and if not, we'll certainly start thinking about this stuff. So, yeah, it wasn't quite what we were hoping for, but at the same time that this discussion has even started is, you know, a huge shift in thinking and attention. And then you have some countries, I mentioned like the UK and Switzerland,

who have passed their net zero legislation and so are legally bound to get to net zero by 2050. and for quite a lot of countries with large militaries, they will find that their militaries and Ministry of Defence are the largest single emitters within government. That's certainly the case in the UK with the Ministry of Defence. So unless it's getting harder and harder for them to kind of ignore the facts, you've got this very large elephant in the room, comforting camouflage material, presumably,

it's why it's been so difficult to find all these years. But yeah, countries are going to have to face up to this and start to address this in a more meaningful way. And the debate and the conversation has started. You know, we've seen coverage on Reuters, BBC, Washington Post, in a way which we haven't really seen before. So there's a hell of a long way to go. Don't get me wrong, but the conversation has started and it's picking up momentum.

Have you had or has there been any response from any of the militaries in an official capacity on this? Have they said anything? Do they recognize that perhaps climate change is an existence? threat to the military itself as well as a quite tangible threat to the planet? Yeah, it's definitely changing. You know, you just had this slew of reports from the DOD a couple of weeks ago, looking at military installations that were going to be vulnerable to climate impacts, as you already seen in a few cases in the US. There's more attention on climate as a trigger or a risk factor for conflict and militias making attention to that. obviously how you react to climate change where there aren't really hard security solutions to climate change. And if you over-militarize these things, then that's not necessarily

really going to get the outcomes, which we would prefer. But there's certainly a lot more attention, a lot more thinking on it. And that was one of outcomes from the NATO summit as well, that Canada were going to set up this NATO Centre of Excellence on climate change to ensure that climate change awareness and thinking is probably embedded in militaries and they can see how they can contribute to it in terms of early warning. data and response capacity and things. So, yeah, it is clearly effective in militaries. They are more aware of it. Some of them probably been more aware of it than quite a few in government have been for quite a long time. It's a case of are they going to start acting on it and acting on it in a way

that isn't just providing military solutions to the problem, but it is actually tackling the root cause of the problem, which is ultimately our emissions and their emissions. And unless you can do both of those things, then, as I said before, they're not going to be taken seriously as as actors in the climate security debate. And I think maybe just on that as well, I think when you look at trying to create institutional change on environmental issues, irrespective of the kind of institution,

a lot of it comes down to the work of individuals. In order to maintain something across organisations, you have to have some super committed individuals who've got the energy. And I think in the case of military is where you have what would be a huge amount of internal inertia, given some of the things we discussed before, or that ministry shouldn't be bothered about the environment.

The environment's not an issue for them. It's going to be this really big task to try and get the environment and climate awareness mainstreamed across institutionally to then kind of create the change that we need to see. But it seems like the change we need to see is for there to be radically less military, right? There needs to be fewer people, fewer installations, fewer vehicles. and there's also other things we need to do, the better management of waste, you know, burn pits aren't great,

etc. But it seems like the biggest and easiest thing would be to just have much less of it. And it seems like that's not a solution they're going to be interested in, right? I think that's an entirely legitimate concern. Given recent experience,

yeah, it's difficult, particularly in countries which are extremely wedded to, grossly extended militaries. And particularly at a time where, you know, on the one hand, you have militaries saying, well, look, the climate crisis is going to destabilise the world. You need to spend more money on militaries so we can address the security problems being created by climate change.

And at the same time, oh, that military spending is actually contributing to climate change. We've, you know, even if you're buying new kit, going, well, look, we need these new tanks or new vehicles with big batteries, which run off electricity. Actually, that comes with a carbon footprint as well. So by procuring new stuff, then you're actually generating more emissions. So, yeah, it's a really difficult issue for miniatures to face and to tackle, and decisions will have to be made. And, you know, there is a much wider conversation about to what extent do we need to look at force structures and how we sort of focus or, yeah, the level of importance we give to different security issues, I think, and how we respond to them, climate change. if you see it generally as a security issue, then what are the solutions, how do we address

the security problems it's going to create? Can you deal with them by having a massively, grossly distended military and shooting at them? Probably not. It's going to be more diplomacy, humanitarian, assisting those who've been severely impacted. And his living conditions have been severely impacted by climate change. So yeah, it's going to be a difficult few decades, I think, he said in British understatement. We're a down-note show. It's all right. Jason, did you have another? No, what I want to say is that that is really depressing.

But Matthew, you could also make the argument that we need a lot fewer people, not just, you know, if you're going to go down the line of much smaller militaries. I mean, you know, well, I mean, I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying, you know, I mean, it's along the same line of thinking. Or equally, you could just share that. stuff out more equally between the people. What are you? Some sort of communist? Geez.

He is European. Keep that in mind. Oh, oh, right. Right. Actually, no. No, after Brexit, you're not. Geology says that we are. I think, actually, just on that point of communist social systems in the EU.

So one of the complaints from militaries has been, we are very large, very complex institutions, therefore we're going to find it very difficult to cut our emissions or have any kind of net zero target. So in the UK, you may have heard about our dreadful communist healthcare system, which provides carefree at the point of need. That's the largest employer in the UK, like it's about a million people who work for it. Anyway, they've just set a net zero target, and it's a net zero target, which deals with their scope one and scope two emissions, which is the fuel, but also their scope three emissions from their supply chains. And somehow this incredibly complex structure of the NHS, which is insanely complex,

because every government for the last, how many years it's been, has implemented changes in its structure. I can think of no organisation more structurally confusing than the NHS, but somehow it's managed to set itself emissions reductions target to meet net zero by 2050. So if they can do it, but I'm fairly sure the Ministry of Defence and other ministries around the world can have a decent cracker. Are you hopeful? It depends how you package up the hope. I think if it's a fairly small package of hope about, oh, this is great. to virtually there's a conversation going on now.

Like, look, there's NATO acknowledging that it needs to reduce its carbon footprint or carbon blueprint. That's great. That's some hope right there. But then, yeah, when you step back at what are the implications of the changes that are needed to military, just as you are to other sectors of society, then, yeah, you need to squeeze that optimism a little harder, I think. Doug Weir, thank you so much for joining us today and bringing us so much hope.

And where's that report going to be and when does it drop, this new website? Yep. So we're going to press the big red button, not that big red button, the green button on the 9th of November, which is, oh my God, next Tuesday. So, yeah, militaryemissions.org. If you check it out then, it should be live by then, and you'll be able to see just how bad the reporting of your government is on its military emissions. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gull, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we are on Substack at AngryPlanet.substack.com or AngryPlanetpod.com, where for $9 a month, you can access to two bonus episodes a month and commercial-free versions of all the rest. Again, if you like the show, please go to Angry PlanetPod.com or AngryPlanet.com or angryplanet.substack.com and kick us a few dollars. Helps keep us going. It will let you know that you really like this.

We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict. on an angry planet. Stay safe until back.