The U.S. Army released the military’s first climate strategy on Tuesday. Along with announced goals to cut greenhouse gas pollution in half by 2035, transition its non-tactical fleet to all electric by 2035, and reach net-zero emissions (including from procurement) by 2050. The “roadmap of actions” includes a renewed focus on assessing and mitigating climate-exacerbated risks to soldiers in the field as well as Army bases and other operations. The military is a major GHG emitter — in 2017 alone it released 59 million tons of climate pollution, more than industrialized nations including as Denmark and Sweden.
“We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in the strategy. “Climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” (E&E News, CNN, Axios, Reuters, CNBC, Politico Pro $, The Hill)