Last week I caught a news item on BBC radio telling us that our spanking new (relatively) aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was now in the Gulf of Oman having returned from the South China Sea where it had been carrying out exercises - presumably to frighten the People's Rebublic of China. Now our Defence Minister was saying it could also be useful in fighting terrorism.... Rather a blunt weapon, I'd have thought. However the part of the report that most caught my attention was that during its voyage there had been daily sorties by the 'elite' F-35 fighter-bombers. Whether these are UK or US planes I don't know.
But I thought, "Every day? Are you joking? When in Glasgow world leaders are talking about climate change..." I imagine each of those planes burns a load of fuel each time it takes off. Well, today I find I wasn't wrong. In fact I was thinking far too small. Will de Freitas, Environment and Energy of the admirable Conversation wrote this.
"At full speed, a fighter jet can burn through hundreds of gallons of fuel per minute. When you add up the emissions caused by all the planes, ships, tanks and missiles used by militaries across the world you get a substantial “carbon bootprint”. But though every country in the world is represented at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, their militaries are not. That’s despite the total emissions of armed forces and their suppliers being larger than civil aviation and shipping combined. In fact, thanks to exemptions written into the Paris Agreement, militaries don’t even need to report how much carbon they are emitting or where. One group of academics has done their best to track these emissions." So I of course looked at the article referred to: "COP26: how the world's militaries hide their huge carbon emissions". I think this is what a former would-be US president would call an inconvenient truth, but it's one governments and media would prefer us not to dwell on. Maybe the world won't be destroyed by nuclear weapons, as we used to fear in my younger days, but by our attachment to being global superpowers.
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