A single F-35 fighter jet burns through roughly 5,600 litres of fuel for every hour it is in the air. A US aircraft carrier strike group on deployment consumes more oil in a week than some small nations use in a year. The B-52 bombers the United States flew over the Middle East in recent months burn so much fuel on a single mission that the carbon from one sortie roughly equals what an average British household produces in twelve months. Nobody adds any of this to a climate ledger. It is not counted, not reported, and not required to be.

This is not a technicality buried in treaty language. It is one of the largest and most consequential gaps in global climate accounting, and it was put there on purpose.

Meanwhile, ordinary people across Europe have been panic-buying rooftop solar panels since the Iran war began, because their energy bills have become unbearable. The EU’s energy commissioner told Reuters this week: “We really do need to get rid of our dependency on gas as fast as possible.” Courts in the United States are fighting over whether the administration can legally block wind and solar projects. A war is doing what years of climate policy could not. The carbon from that same war belongs to nobody. That is the contradiction this article wants to name.

I. The Rule Nobody Talks About

Most people know, in a general way, that countries have agreed to cut their carbon emissions. They know about Paris. They know about net-zero targets. What very few people know is that when governments signed up to these commitments, they quietly left their militaries out.

This was not an accident. When the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, the United States made it plain that it would not accept emissions targets that applied to the Pentagon. The Pentagon burns more fuel than most countries on earth. Other governments, wanting the United States at the table, accepted the condition. Military emissions were removed from the list of things that had to be reported or reduced.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 inherited this arrangement without question. Countries can choose to include their defence emissions in their national climate pledges. They are not required to. Most do not. So the fighter jets, the warships, the armoured convoys, the supply chains that keep armies fed and fuelled across multiple continents: none of it appears in the numbers governments present at climate summits.

The countries with the biggest militaries gain most from this silence. In 2023, global military spending hit a record two and a half trillion dollars, driven almost entirely by the United States and its NATO allies.(1) The more a country spends on its military, the more it gains from not counting what that military emits.

II. What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Researchers at Brown University spent years calculating what the US military alone puts into the atmosphere. Their figure: roughly 59 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year, more than the entire annual emissions of Portugal, or Denmark, or dozens of comparable countries. This covers only the United States, only in peacetime, and is almost certainly an undercount, because the data governments release is incomplete.(2) A joint report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory and Scientists for Global Responsibility estimated that all the world’s militaries together account for somewhere between one and five per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and noted even this was probably conservative.(3)

These are peacetime numbers. They do not include what happens in an actual war.

When a building is bombed or demolished, it releases what engineers call embodied carbon: the carbon that went into making the concrete, the steel, the glass in the first place. That energy is stored in the material. Destroy the building and it escapes. When entire neighbourhoods are flattened, when hospitals and schools and apartment blocks are reduced to rubble, the embodied carbon of decades of construction goes back into the atmosphere in weeks.

The Conflict and Environment Observatory estimated that the first two years of the war in Ukraine generated over 100 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent, once military operations, infrastructure destruction, and reconstruction energy were counted together.(4) That is comparable to the annual emissions of a medium-sized European country. It belongs to no national inventory. In Gaza, independent researchers monitoring the environment throughout 2024 found contaminated soil and groundwater, destroyed waste systems, and sustained air pollution from burning across some of the most densely built land on earth.(5) The carbon cost of the rubble alone has never been calculated. Rebuilding, if it ever begins, will require enormous energy. None of that will appear in any government’s climate pledge.

The governments most involved in supporting these wars, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, are the same governments that publish the most ambitious climate targets. Britain has a Climate Change Act. The EU has its Green Deal. The gap between what they promise and what they exempt is not a mistake. It is a decision.

III. What the Law Does Not Say

International law makes some effort to protect environments during war. The Geneva Conventions prohibit methods of warfare expected to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment. The Rome Statute lists serious environmental destruction as a potential war crime.(6) But “widespread, long-term and severe” was written to exclude almost everything short of nuclear catastrophe, and “clearly excessive” has never been successfully prosecuted. These thresholds were not oversights. They were demands made by powerful states during the drafting process, so their own military actions would remain beyond legal reach.

More fundamentally, none of these provisions deals with carbon at all. They address visible, acute events: a poisoned river, an oil field set alight. They say nothing about the slow, cumulative, invisible accumulation of greenhouse gases that comes from running a military, year after year, at war or at peace. That gap is not accidental either.

There are more promising currents developing elsewhere. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in July 2025 stating that countries have binding legal obligations to prevent foreseeable climate harm. Delegates are meeting this week in Santa Marta, Colombia, attempting to turn that opinion into something enforceable.(7) Rebecca Brown of the Centre for International Environmental Law stated the position plainly: “Phasing out our fossil fuels, delivering climate justice, and addressing climate harms are legal obligations, not political choices.” Whether this momentum will ever reach military emissions is uncertain. The pressure to maintain the exemption will be intense, and it will come from the same states that wrote it into the original agreements.

IV. Who Is Actually Paying the Price

The Middle East and North Africa produces less than four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is also among the regions projected to suffer most severely from climate change: extreme heat, dwindling water, failing harvests, mass displacement.(8)

Consider what this means for a family in Gaza. They have contributed almost nothing to the atmospheric carbon that is already making their summers hotter and their water scarcer. Their city has been reduced to rubble in a war whose emissions are attributed to nobody. When that rubble is eventually cleared and buildings go up again, the energy for reconstruction will go uncounted too. And they still face a future of worsening heat and water scarcity, driven overwhelmingly by emissions from the countries that bombed them.

This is what scholars working at the intersection of international law and colonial history have long identified: global legal rules tend to impose the heaviest burdens on the countries that had least say in writing them.(9) Climate law reproduces this pattern precisely. The countries with the largest military footprints wrote themselves out of the one area of climate accounting that would expose them most. The populations bearing the consequences live somewhere else.

Patrick Bigger and Benjamin Neimark named this carbon colonialism: the military and geopolitical activities of the wealthiest states impose environmental costs on communities that had no part in creating them and have no legal route to challenge them.(10) The term is not a metaphor. It describes the mechanism of how the current legal order functions. A family in Gaza is bombed by weapons whose carbon nobody counts, in a region made hotter by emissions nobody curtailed, and offered no legal redress for either. That is not an accident of international law. It is what international law, in its present form, produces.

V. The Simple Thing That Nobody Will Say

Peace is climate policy. This should be obvious. It is almost entirely absent from formal climate negotiations.

The money spent on weapons, military bases, aircraft carriers, and long-range missile systems is money not spent on renewable energy infrastructure, flood defences, or drought-resistant agriculture. Every billion that goes into a weapons system is a billion that does not go into a solar grid in the Sahel or a seawall in Bangladesh. The scale of this opportunity cost is enormous. Almost nobody in mainstream climate politics will say so in public, because saying so requires naming which countries are responsible, and those are the countries that fund and host the negotiations.

Closing the military exemption would require two things. First, mandatory disclosure: the body overseeing the Paris Agreement must require all states to report military emissions under the same binding rules as every other sector. This has been proposed inside UNFCCC negotiations before. The United States and its allies have blocked it every time. Second, honesty: political leaders of the most heavily militarised states must say publicly what the evidence demands, that the carbon cost of war is real, it belongs to someone, and the countries most responsible cannot carry on setting climate targets that exempt their largest institutional source of emissions.

The legal imagination exists. The ICJ opinion, the growing body of climate litigation, the developing concept of ecocide as an international crime: these show that law can move when political will supports it. What is missing is not legal mechanism. It is the refusal, so far absolute, of the most powerful states to be measured by the same standard they demand of everyone else.

The B-52s are still flying. The carrier groups are still burning fuel by the shipload. And across Europe, people are fitting solar panels to their roofs, not because governments finally got serious about climate change, but because a war made their electricity bills unbearable.

The carbon from that war floats in the atmosphere uncounted, attributed to no one, belonging to nothing. The climate emergency is real. So is the decision about whose emergency it gets to be.

Notes

(1) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), SIPRI Military Expenditure Database (2024), sipri.org/databases/milex.

(2) Neta C. Crawford, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War (Costs of War Project, Brown University, 2019).

(3) Stuart Parkinson & Linsey Cottrell, Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Scientists for Global Responsibility & Conflict and Environment Observatory, 2021).

(4) Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), The Environmental Dimensions of the War in Ukraine: Preliminary Assessment (CEOBS, 2024).

(5) Environmental monitoring documentation compiled by CEOBS and independent researchers throughout 2024, drawing on satellite analysis and field reporting from the Gaza Strip.

(6) Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Protocol I), Art 35(3); Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Art 8(2)(b)(iv).

(7) Sharon Kits Kimathi, “Energy shock from Iran war sparks solar scramble,” Reuters Sustainable Switch, 24 April 2026. The Santa Marta conference runs 24-29 April 2026, following the UN General Assembly resolution on state climate obligations led by Vanuatu.

(8) IPCC, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report (Cambridge University Press, 2022), MENA regional projections.

(9) Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

(10) Patrick Bigger & Benjamin Neimark, “Weaponizing Nature: The Geopolitical Ecology of the US Navy’s Biofuel Program,” Political Geography 60 (2017), 13-22.

Further reading

Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Benjamin Neimark & Cara Kennelly, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(1) (2020), 65-80.

Neta C. Crawford, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War (Costs of War Project, Brown University, 2019).

Conflict and Environment Observatory, The Environmental Dimensions of the War in Ukraine (CEOBS, 2024).

Parkinson & Cottrell, Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Scientists for Global Responsibility & CEOBS, 2021).

Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Sharon Kits Kimathi, “Energy shock from Iran war sparks solar scramble,” Reuters Sustainable Switch, 24 April 2026.

Özge Onay is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, power, and inequality. She is particularly interested in the various manifestations of racism and racialisation, as well as issues of political space and belonging, marginalisation, Islamophobia, and environmental racism. linkedin.com/in/drozgeonay

Published under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).