Reason (summarized): 

 

Speech:

When we talk about climate change, the world’s militaries escape our minds.

So, sometimes, we note it down on a piece of paper and keep it around us so we remember. But nations, especially during the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement, throw away this piece of paper and let it fall into a pile of issues.

And while we have the statistics, the words, and the people, the first action is to frame it under public interest and act like it’s taken care of.

They shrug away the details as if it’s dirt on their tailored coat.

Why? Because the cause is “obsolete”.

The first and foremost excuse for this is that it attacks “national security.”

No.

It does not.

The primary argument that governments use to avoid reporting military fuel consumption is that it reveals tactical operations or troop movements. What they fail to realise is that no one is asking for real-time fighter jet coordinates. The UN demands aggregated, yearly fuel procurement data. We don’t want to know where you’re going, we want to know how your journey affects the environment. Is that so hard?

The second disguise hides behind the net-zero phrase: for a country cannot claim to be on a path to Net-Zero while keeping its single largest state-run emitter completely off the books. Every nation does this.

And do you know what makes this so very maddening?

It’s that this isn’t an oversight, this is a deliberate structural exclusion.

During the drafting of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the United States openly lobbied for and won a blanket exemption from carbon limits for national security reasons. Not only that, the 2015 Paris Agreement made reporting the data technically voluntary instead of strictly exempt, which is clearly showcasing how the system ignores a world-threatening issue with a cloak of national security.

But the action is done right? By framing this crisis in public interest or letting it get lost in state-level bureaucratic paperwork, they paint a picture with water and forget that eventually it will dry out and disappear.

So at that very expense, can every single nation answer how their domestic Net-Zero law accounts for their very own defense’s carbon footprint?

No. Every nation cannot answer.

But let’s keep that aside and take another look at the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which the UNFCCC holds a Global Stocktake to assess collective progress towards the agreement goals. So, in this Global Stocktake, the issue was not framed as an ethical or environmental protest, instead it was dismissed as a bureaucratic formality.

And to challenge that, we will introduce it as a data integrity crisis. If you measure progress with numbers, then the lack of it only introduces a mathematically flawed idea.

Do you know why?

Because if the UN’s climate models are missing 5.5% of global emissions, then every single projection, temperature target, and carbon budget the UN calculates is a mile away from what actually needs to be done and therefore, it is mathematically flawed.

It is undeniably obvious that if you don’t account for children in India for a global census, you haven’t covered the entirety of the world at all. In the same way, it is also inherently clear that the world can not label the climate crisis as an existential, pressing threat while ignoring the world’s most carbon-intensive institutions; it strictly cannot treat them as an exemption, as a passive issue.

Because really almost everybody cares about climate action until you actually have to do the work. You don’t learn how to swim by advocating and reading about it; you learn how to swim when you get in the water and try.

Fortunately, for this one, nobody has to get in a pool, all that needs to be done is (1) make a policy (2) efficiently implement for long periods of time and (3) update it when it’s outdated or purpose-less.

As simple as that.

And for that, I introduce 3 policy lines that strip this problem of its validity:

Mandate Reporting: Amend the IPCC Guidelines for national Greenhouse Gas Inventories to strip away voluntary loopholes, which makes it a strict rule requiring state parties to explicitly state and report all military and defense sector emissions. This targets Scope 1, 2, & 3 annually.

Standardize The Ledger: All this means is to note down our data for military fuel, supply chain logistics, and weapon manufacturing without revealing the weapons, tactical operations, and/or national security ideas. This can be done through a transparent, standardized accounting framework under the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) to ensure it is carried out successfully.

Account for Liabilities Caused: Include the carbon costs of active warfare, post-conflict reconstruction, landscape destruction, material usage and impacts in the tracking mechanisms in the Loss and Damage Fund. This way we can correctly calculate what we’ve done and create solutions that resolve it.

Note that Scope 1 is for direct fuel combustion for military operations and vehicles, Scope 2 is for the electricity and grid energy used by military bases, and Scope 3 is for weapons manufacturing and the uncounted emissions of active warfare and reconstruction by the IPCC categories.

To make sure we eradicate this systemic erasure of a “seemingly obsolete” cause, support the petition!