By Doug Weir, King’s College London; Benjamin Neimark, Lancaster University, and Oliver Belcher, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change leadership requires more than stirring speeches. It means facing up to hard truths. One truth that governments around the world are struggling with is the immense contribution their militaries are making to the climate crisis.

For example, the US Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world – and the largest institutional emitter. Two of us worked on a 2019 study which showed that if the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal. In other words, the US military is a more consequential climate actor…