Earth’s Greatest Enemy: “You can’t green a global military empire”

New documentary from Abby Martin and Mike Prysner about the US military.

A new documentary by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner focuses on the environmental impacts of the US military, by far the world’s largest and most destructive war machine. The documentary is titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”.

Martin is an antiwar activist, artist and journalist. She hosted a show called “Breaking the Set” on Russia Today. In February 2015, she left RT. The previous year she criticised Russia’s military occupation of Crimea. She and Prysner launched The Empire Files in September 2015.

Prysner is a US Army veteran who served in Iraq and Syria. “It was my firsthand experiences in Iraq that radicalized me,” he told journalist Dahr Jamail in February 2013. He is now an antiwar activist. Prysner and Martin are married.

The US is a global military empire. The biggest empire ever. The US has 800 bases around the world. The film documents the destruction caused by this empire. Contaminated drinking water poisoning military families. Toxic air in Iraq. Toxic waste dumps. Cites demolished by bombing. Millions of people killed in US wars. Corals destroyed to make way for a military base. Waste and sonar pollution in the oceans.

The film is currently being screened in Canada, Sweden, Australia, and the UK. It is also available on Vimeo (where it can be rented) and YouTube (for members only). It’s an excellent film and well worth watching.

US military and the climate crisis

The documentary brings together Martin and Prysner’s opposition to the US war machine and their “profound climate anxiety”.

They read Dahr Jamail’s book, “The End of Ice,” a book that featured on REDD-Monitor when it was published in 2019:

They travel with Jamail to Alaska to look at the disappearing glaciers. “It’s scary and its saddening, and it’s also, it makes me really angry,” Jamail says. “I can’t imagine a bigger injustice.”

The US military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. The US air force is bigger than the next five biggest combined. Yet military emissions are not included in the UN climate negotiations.

The documentary includes footage of Bill Clinton talking about the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at COP3 in 1997. “This is a very good agreement,” Clinton says. “It’s going to be possible for us to do this and grow our economy. We got what we wanted, which is a market oriented approach.”

In Kyoto, the US reduced the target from 15% by 2010 down to 5.2% by 2012. The US lead negotiator, Al Gore, insisted on the inclusion of carbon trading in the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2004, Gore launched Generation Investment Management to profit from carbon trading.

As Martin points out, the “US lobbied for its military to get blanket exemption from its national total, on the ground of national security.” All other countries also did so. Ever since, the world’s militaries have been excluded from all UN climate meetings.

“That makes the agreements, in other words, a farce,” Martin says.

“A corporate trade show”

The documentary team travelled to Glasgow to COP26, which took place in 2021. If the fossil fuel industry were a country, it would have had the largest delegation at the conference. “What becomes really obvious is how much corporations are really driving the narrative,” Martin says. “It’s just a corporate trade show.”

Martin asks a session moderated by Nancy Pelosi, then-Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Pentagon budget had recently increased. “How can we seriously talk about net zero, if military is exempt from climate talks?” Martin asks.

Frank Pallone, a Democratic party politician, replied. Instead of addressing the question, he talked about rising sea levels. He said he’d had many talks with the Navy about how they have to respond to what’s going on. “I don’t see what we’re doing in any way, increasing the defence budget, as being something that is inconsistent with climate action,” he said.

“National security advisers all tell us that the climate crisis is a national security matter,” Pelosi added.

Martin asked a series of US government officials whether they agreed that the military should be exempt from climate talks. None replied either yes or no, except Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said that, “To omit conversations about military investment is to omit measuring our CO₂ emissions,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The documentary links capitalism and militarism. The first overseas bases were to access coal for the military. “You can’t green a global military empire,” Martin says.

“For US capitalism to grow, it had to grow its military to conquer new markets and raw materials. The military, powered by fossil fuels, had to increase how much it could store and how many places it could store it. To do that, it needed a bigger military, which in turn required more fossil fuels. Oil would soon become the dominant national security priority.”

Nick Buxton of the Transnational Institute has worked on the military and the climate crisis for many years. He says that,

“There’s a reason why the US has 800 military bases around the world. Why has it gotten in every corner of the globe? You see where those bases are, they’re in the Middle East. It’s about securing access to the key resources. They’re near the shipping routes which really keeps the whole flow of capital flowing. And that involves huge consumption of oil and gas. So they have a very direct involvement in causing the climate crisis.

“But they have an indirect role as well. I think that’s a role that’s less talked about but is probably more important. And that’s because it wants an infrastructure to support the free flow of corporations and supply chains that supply the US economy. It wants to have access to the key areas of strategic resources. And that’s why it gets deployed internationally.

“And so what you see is a whole empire that is really geared entirely around keeping the flow of the fossil fuel economy flowing.”