Militaries are among the world’s biggest emitters. This general wants them to go green

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By Michael Birnbaum, The Washington Post. 

Excerpt: [Richard] Nugee was a three-star general at the peak of his career, after a long string of deployments in the world’s conflict zones, including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. ...in the final fight of his military life, he decided to take on one of the wiliest adversaries: climate change. Militaries are both enormous emitters and facing fearsome new conflicts sparked by global warming. Nugee resolved to fight a lonely battle to address both problems. ...Fighting a war burns prodigious quantities of fossil fuels. The Pentagon, by some counts, is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. ...He assembled a step-by-step plan to slash military emissions and prepare the armed forces for a hotter planet. Wars may be fought over access to water. Millions could be forced to migrate because of extreme weather. Emboldened rivals such as China and Russia are already starting to plow their warships across the melting Arctic. The strategy was published earlier this year. “This is not doing it for moral reasons. This is not doing it because it’s about emissions. It’s about our own capability, it’s about our ability to be the most successful and the most credible force that we can,” Nugee said in Glasgow, where he was one of few with a military background amid the galaxy of people trying to fight for a cooler planet.…

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