2024 Grawemeyer Awardee in world order calls on military to reduce carbon emissions

In a lecture at UofL on April 11, SSP alum Neta Crawford, winner of the 2024 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, described how in 2018, she began searching for data on the carbon emissions produced by the U.S. military. When she found the data was not readily available, she began calculating it herself. She found that the U.S. military was responsible for 81 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year–more than the total emissions for many entire countries.

Crawford commended emission reduction programs in the military but called for bigger changes. “The military has very good people looking at incremental ways to reduce their emissions. I’m talking about a much larger restructuring, though, and that’s not happening,” Crawford said. “What I am arguing in the book is, first of all, count the emissions. Secondly, they don’t have to be as high. The military has shown, in fact, that they can decrease their emissions. They are not doing it very ambitiously, and they can. And this matters.”