Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an obvious humanitarian crisis. But a hidden crisis is unfolding too: The carbon emitted by war machines is helping warm the planet at a critical moment in human history, adding to the compounding misery of climate change.
, they’re burning through more fuel. “Jet fuels by far are the most dirty emissions,” says Durham University political scientist Oliver Belcher. “It is a more potent polluter just by virtue of the type of fuel that's used, but on top of that, the amount of fuel that burns is extraordinary.”
Yet it’s difficult to put a figure on exactly how much carbon has been emitted so far in this particular war. For one thing, many of the available statistics on military emissions come from studying the United States and the European Union, not Russia and Ukraine. For another, getting figures on an armed force’s fuel usage is the most straightforward way to estimate emissions, but it doesn’t paint a complete picture.
But there are some ways to get a sense of the environmental damage. Last year the Conflict and Environment Observatory, commissioned by the Left Group in the European Parliament,print, if you will—of the EU’s military sector. Critically, they also considered indirect emissions—for example, those created by the defense industry supply chains that support military operations. Producing missiles and ammunition takes energy, and then you’ve got to use more energy to ship the goods around.
There are inherent data gaps, but the observatory’s researchers reckoned that in 2019, military emissions in the EU were equal to those of 14 million cars. And that was
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