Agreements to boost cooperation between coastguards, maritime security and trade likely to anger China.

For as long as the world’s diplomats have gathered to talk about slowing the march of climate change, the one institution pointedly missing from the agenda has been the military. This has been by design: At the behest of the U.S., reporting military emissions was largely exempted from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the document that set binding emissions targets for nations that signed. The 2015 Paris Agreement overturned the old exemption but still did not require reporting of military emissions. Data remain stupendously spotty. Only late last year, in the lead-up to the COP28 United Nations climate meeting in Dubai, was the connection between the military and climate change brought up in brief mentions in a key report.

Perhaps this was because, in some cases, militaries themselves have begun announcing programs to “green” their operations. Or because the nations at COP28 gathered against the backdrop of two active wars. Or because the climate situation has become dire enough that the world can no longer afford to ignore any major source of emissions. Maintaining a military is on its own a highly energy-intensive endeavor, and war, in addition to its immediate human toll, can rapidly produce even larger spikes in greenhouse gases.

Whatever the reason, military emissions are now up for the tiniest amount of discussion. A line in the UN’s 2023 “Global Emissions Gap Report” noted that emissions from the military are “likely nontrivial” but remain “insufficiently accounted [for]” under current reporting standards. This was the first time the issue has ever appeared in a UN emissions gap report, Linsey Cottrell of the Conflict and Environment Observatory told me at COP28. Her organization has attempted to estimate the global carbon footprint of the military using available information and put the figure at 5.5 percent, which is more than the total emissions of the continent of Africa.

Another first, per Cottrell: The European Union put out a call to include military emissions in national net-zero targets in its COP28 resolution. “We were always a bit hesitant in our legislation to include military,” Peter Liese, the chair of the EU’s delegation, said when one of Cottrell’s colleagues asked about the language during a press conference in Dubai. He called it a “tricky” issue. “It is of course sensible,” he added. But now “the military itself” is addressing it openly: “They understand that they also need to look at the climate effect of what they are doing.”

The U.S. military, meanwhile, is the single largest institutional consumer of petroleum in the world, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. It uses all that oil to fly its jets, power its ships, and fuel its roughly 750 bases across 80 countries and territories. Because of incomplete data, comparing the emissions of the world’s militaries is difficult. The United Kingdom’s House of Commons estimated that the U.K.’s military, which also has an extensive global presence, was responsible for  3.3 million metric tons for fiscal year 2021–22, though that number did not include its defense industry, which would likely bump it up far higher. China, which is currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has among the largest number of active-duty military personnel and a comparatively small global military presence but does not report its military emissions, Cottrell said.

The U.S. Department of Defense puts its own emissions at 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in fiscal year 2021, which was roughly the same as the emissions produced by Sweden. (In response to an inquiry about the military’s emissions disclosures, a spokesperson pointed me to this report, which was congressionally mandated.) About half of the total came from jet-fuel use. That’s more than three-quarters of the U.S. government’s total emissions, and 1 percent of the total emissions of the country in 2020. And that’s to say nothing of defense contractors, who are not presently required to disclose their emissions. Crawford estimates that if the industrial complex that supports the military—weapons manufacturing, for example—were included, the total would make up about 2 percent of U.S. emissions.  

When, in the 1990s, the U.S. pushed against any requirement to disclose emissions in the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. military officials warned that reporting their emissions could harm military readiness. The implication, Neta Crawford, a professor at the University of Oxford and a co-director of the Costs of War project, told me, was that “they knew that they had a very large greenhouse-gas-emissions footprint” and didn’t want to have to shrink it. The exemption was important enough to the U.S. that when Stuart Eizenstat, then the country’s chief climate negotiator, assured a congressional committee—which included now-President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry—that he’d secured it, Kerry congratulated him. At the time, reaching the world’s more modest emissions-cutting goals without touching the world’s militaries seemed possible—the EU’s emissions target was to cut just 8 percent of greenhouse gases; the U.S.’s was 7 percent. But now, COP negotiators are discussing how to reach net zero, which would be impossible without addressing military emissions.

[Read: The world could be entering a new era of climate war]

Even after the 2015 Paris Agreement replaced the Kyoto-era exemption with an option to disclose, UN reporting guidelines advise that military emissions should be reported under a “non-specified” category, which could include many other sources. Confusing things further, the emissions of a peacetime military are one thing; war increases them substantially. Accounting for the climate impact of a war is its own messy business, and experts can produce only a best guess based on partial information. A recent analysis, not yet peer-reviewed, tried to account for the emissions from the first 60 days of Israel’s campaign against Hamas—one of the largest contributors, the researchers estimated, were U.S. cargo planes flying in military supplies—and put the total higher than the annual emissions of many individual small countries and territories, including the Central African Republic and Belize. The latest estimate of the carbon consequences of Russia’s war on Ukraine puts the conflict’s emissions on par with the total yearly emissions of Belgium.

Lately, major militaries have been looking for at least some solutions. “There is no way to reach net zero without also including emissions from the military,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at COP26, in 2021. DoD employees were on hand this year at COP to champion the department’s green initiatives, which include an Army plan to build microgrids on all of its installations and moves toward electric combat vehicles. These changes are largely motivated by the security risk posed by climate change and fossil-fuel supplies themselves. “In Iraq and Afghanistan, the most vulnerable soldiers were the ones who were transporting that fuel. And we don’t want to put our soldiers in that kind of harm’s way any more,” Rachel Jacobson, the assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy, and environment, said on a COP28 panel.

Plus, climate change provides opportunities for the military to exert its soft power in far-flung places. Because global warming will destabilize “geopolitically vulnerable regions,” allowing “nefarious actors to move in,” Jacobson said, the U.S. has an interest in assisting these climate-addled places “where we may not otherwise have those kinds of engagements.” She said the Army Corps of Engineers is fixing water-management issues and responding to climate disasters in places such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. “In Ecuador, we’re providing technical assistance—get this—focused on the catastrophic erosion and sedimentation caused by a Chinese-built dam,” Jacobson said.

[Read: The grim ironies of climate change]

The U.S. military’s emissions have been dropping dramatically since the 1970s, though not necessarily driven by microgrids or electric tanks. These reductions in part come from closing bases overseas, as part of the general drawing back since the conclusion of the Cold War, according to Crawford’s research. The DoD itself credits drops in emissions since 2010 to reductions in combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, increased energy efficiency and use of renewables, and, more recently, COVID-related cuts to military exercises.

For those who see a smaller military as a humanitarian good, the solution is obvious: The only way to significantly rein emissions in further would be to shrink global American military presence even more. One day in the middle of the two-week negotiations in Dubai, two people walked into the media center holding signs that said STOP WAR and GO GREEN, with 10% Military Budget for Climate Fund! in small text along the bottom. Those people were Sun-Jin Yun, a dean of environmental studies at Seoul National University, and Yul Choi, a notable Korean environmentalist who in 1995 won a Goldman Prize, a sort of Nobel for the environmental set, for his work fighting pollution and nuclear weapons. “War itself emits lots of greenhouse gases,” Yun told me. “Also, we waste money to have wars. But that money can go to climate funds to save the lives of developing countries.”

At COP28, countries most battered by climate change were fighting for mere slivers of the world’s military spending, which clocked in globally at about $2.2 trillion in 2022, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. A new “loss and damage” fund to address climate damage in vulnerable countries set a goal of $100 billion but failed to raise even $1 billion. The U.S., the largest historical emitter in the world, announced that it would aim to give $17.5 million; its upcoming annual military budget totals $886 billion.

The idea of diverting military budget into climate funds might be appealing if you believe that an expansive military apparatus does more harm than good. But if you believe that global stability hinges on an expansive military, the question of how to reduce its contribution to the destabilizing force of climate change is thornier. Climate change will cause future harm, instability, and conflict; war and military operations also exacerbate climate crises through food shortages, contamination, and displacement. Addressing military emissions ultimately is a conversation about how to view security on Earth. But it is a conversation that must take place. And as with all things related to climate change, progress can’t come soon enough.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Some of President Joe Biden’s critics argue that he did not have the authority to launch yesterday’s strikes in Yemen, but America’s presidents have significant constitutional powers regarding the use of military force.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

January 6 is exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment was talking about. American universities are post-truth. China won’t leave Taiwan’s election to the Taiwanese. Substack was a ticking time bomb.

Presidents and the Use of Force

In America’s deeply divided political environment, today’s bipartisan support for President Biden’s strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen is a rare but encouraging moment. Democrats and Republicans alike recognized that Biden did the right thing. Indeed, some Republican leaders may have a point that Biden waited longer than necessary to react to the ongoing Houthi attacks in the region, which have already created so much hazard for maritime commerce that container-ship activity in the Suez Canal is down by 90 percent.

The operation, short and limited to military targets, and in a nation that cannot control the piratical acts of an unwelcome group, falls well within the legal as well as the traditional requirements for the use of force by members of the international community. So far, both American political parties, even with a bit of GOP grumbling, have made the right call to support action against the Houthis. Biden’s actions, however, have also generated opposition from a much smaller bipartisan group of progressive Democrats and hard-right isolationist Republicans, who are making the case that Biden did not have the authority to launch military action.

Some of these accusations are merely glitter and sequins pasted onto bad-faith partisan arguments. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, for one, has joined with a handful of Democratic progressives who argue that Biden is violating the Constitution. (Lee seems to imagine himself as the constitutional conscience of the Senate, which has not deterred him from supporting Donald Trump or spewing conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection.)

The constitutional objections from progressives, including Representatives Ro Khanna of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, don’t make much sense, even if they are offered in good faith. (Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan has also voiced her opposition to the strikes, but her added flourish that “the American people are tired of endless war” suggests something less like good faith and more like signaling her bona fides to the far left.)

Such objections have been lodged before about various U.S. operations around the world, ordered by presidents of both parties. They are rooted in the inherent tension in the Constitution between Article I, Section 8, which reserves to Congress the power to declare war, and Article II, Section 2, which designates the president as the commander in chief of the armed forces. Congress decides when a state of war exists between the United States and a foreign adversary; the president otherwise directs the actions of the U.S. military.

But does the president need to ask Congress every time he directs the armed forces of the United States to engage in violence? Jayapal seems to think so: Article I, she posted on X yesterday, “requires that military action be authorized by Congress.” Khanna was more specific, saying that this particular action needed to be approved—but that’s a small distinction without much of a difference.

Article I says none of these things, and in any case, America has not actually declared war on anyone since the spring of 1942. (This is a great bar bet, by the way: Most people will guess that the last U.S. declaration of war took place in 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but declarations against the minor Axis members Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania took place six months later.)

Even Korea and Vietnam were not declared wars; rather, American presidents ordered troops into combat while relying on the self-defense provisions of the United Nations charter, as well as enforcing our legal obligations under treaties of alliance. Likewise, presidents have argued that acting in self-defense or to prevent further harm to ourselves or our friends does not require congressional approval.

Vietnam and Korea, however, were clearly wars—despite the reluctance of successive administrations to say so even while engaging in conscription. In 1973, Congress, infuriated by President Richard Nixon’s widening of the war to Cambodia, passed the War Powers Resolution. Unfortunately, the act was a sloppy piece of legislation that allows Congress to direct the withdrawal of U.S. forces from action 60 days after the deployment of U.S. forces, unless Congress declares war, extends the 60-day period, or is unable to meet due to enemy action, such as a nuclear attack. Nixon vetoed it (rightly, in my view) as an unconstitutional trespass by Congress on the executive branch’s authority.

Congress overrode his veto, but for a half century, no one has really had the gumption to invoke the resolution as a limit on U.S. military action. Presidents have submitted reports to Congress on their military actions more than 130 times over the past decades; Congress, for its part, has remained reluctant to claim the authority to direct military conflicts. Instead, American leaders have resorted to makeshift fixes such as “authorization for use of military force,” pieces of legislation that allow presidents to conduct undeclared wars while Congress leaves open for itself the later possibilities of either grabbing some of the laurels of victory or avoiding the shared stench of failure.

The War Powers Resolution is also inherently dangerous: During a conflict, it sets a public timer in motion that American enemies might use against the United States. During the first Gulf War, for example, I advised a senior Republican senator, John Heinz of Pennsylvania. He was thinking of joining with other GOP senators to invoke the resolution as a means of helping President George H. W. Bush by granting him the authority he needed to fight Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I made the same arguments as other opponents of the resolution, noting that the time limit could encourage Saddam to wait out the Americans long enough to provoke a fight between Congress and the White House. Heinz agreed.

I have long been a critic of how Congress has abdicated its responsibilities in national security and national defense to the executive branch. But Biden’s actions in Yemen were, even by more restrictive standards, well within the bounds of U.S. and international law, as well as the centuries-old norms governing armed conflict. If members of Congress want to place limits on presidential uses of force, they should repeal the flawed War Powers Resolution and replace it with something else. (I am especially anxious that they do this with regard to the employment of nuclear weapons.)

Such solutions might well end up before the Supreme Court, where well-intentioned people can make solid arguments that the modern presidency needs better limits on the powers of the commander in chief. The world is full of conflicts that could be difficult test cases for such arguments, but what happened in Yemen over the past 24 hours is not one of them.

Related:

The Houthis have backed Iran into a corner. The leaders who aspire only to hold on to power (from 2022)

Today’s News

The Justice Department is seeking the death penalty for Payton Gendron, who killed 10 people in a racially motivated shooting targeting Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. The Supreme Court will review an appeals-court ruling dealing with municipal ordinances that ban homeless people from camping on public property. The court will decide if these local laws constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Texas National Guard and state troopers are blocking U.S. Border Patrol agents from patrolling a 2.5-mile stretch on the Texas-Mexico border, intensifying the conflict between state and federal authorities in the area.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A conversation with Anastasia Edel, a Russian-born American social historian, on what to read to understand Russia.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

“Plant-Based” Has Lost All Meaning

By Yasmin Tayag

Beyond the meat aisle, the “plant-based” label lives on in virtually every food product imaginable: instant ramen, boxed mac and cheese, Kraft singles, KitKat bars, even queso. You can now buy plant-based peanut butter. You can also wash your hair with plant-based shampoo and puff on a plant-based vape.

Queso made from cauliflower instead of milk is correctly described as plant-based. But if peanut butter is vegan to begin with, then what is the point of the label? And who asked for plant-based liquor? On packaging and ad copy, plant-based has been applied to so many items—including foods that are highly processed, or those that have never contained animal ingredients—that it has gotten “diluted to nothing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa who studies food, told me.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The return of TV’s most soulful show How Octavia Butler told the future Is economic pessimism the media’s fault?

Culture Break

Jojo Whilden / Paramount

Watch. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by the musical reboot of Mean Girls, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Read. Hisham Matar’s new novel is about a Libyan immigrant haunted by the anguish of exile, Ben Rhodes writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam described the elevation of McGeorge Bundy first to full professor, then to the deanship of Harvard in 1953. Bundy had a lowly appointment in the government department when his colleagues submitted his name to Harvard’s president, the distinguished chemist James Bryant Conant, for tenure. One wonders what could have been in Bundy’s dossier: He hadn’t written much, and his sole degree was a bachelor’s in mathematics from Yale. But Bundy was a known genius. Conant, according to Halberstam, signed off with a sigh. Tenure in government, for a man who had no Ph.D.—in fact had never taken a class in government—and few publications? “All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened in Chemistry,” Conant said.

Yesterday, another Harvard president, Claudine Gay, announced her intention to resign, after nearly a month of critique, justified and not, of her response to alleged campus anti-Semitism and her academic record. Her publication record is extremely thin, and much of it contains passages cribbed from other scholars. The end of her presidency took too long to come, and the delay was at her expense. Once the conservative gadfly Christopher Rufo and the Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium sensed her weakness, they found more and more instances of cribbing.

Those who rose to defend her as a scholar were left unsure whether the most recent plagiarism accusations, or criticism of her research methodology, would be the last. Eventually the uncertainty wore those defenders down. They may also have noticed that Gay herself remained mostly silent and preferred to communicate through university press releases. To be the public face of Harvard means to go out in public, and she was not doing much of that, either on her own behalf or on behalf of the university. A university president needs to be a scholar or a politician, and by yesterday one could seriously doubt whether she was either.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Harvard has a veritas problem]

The Bundy story illustrates how standards have changed over the years, and how they have not. Like Bundy, Gay was a product of extreme privilege. Gay did not have a ridiculous WASP-y name or pallor, but she comes from a wealthy family and attended Exeter and Stanford. (Bundy was a Groton man.) Bundy was installed as dean in a manner that no Michigan State grad, no matter how brilliant, ever would have been. Gay’s rise, similarly, depended on the willingness of various members of America’s power elite to overlook her shortcomings and defend her when others with similar deficiencies would have been cut loose.

Gay compares, in this sense, favorably with Bundy. But what about Conant, one of the great chemists of his era? Harvard has, in the past century, had two rough categories of president: those notable for their scholarship, and those notable for something else—past success in administration, say, or origins in a particular part of the country. Gay’s defenders erred in trying to suggest that she was, like Conant or Lawrence H. Summers, one of the scholars. When she was appointed, the university’s alumni magazine heralded her as “a scholar’s scholar,” and when Rufo and others impugned her scholarship, they were accused of racism. (In her resignation, Gay herself suggested that the critique of her scholarship was “fueled by racial animus.”) In truth, Gay was more like Nathan M. Pusey. Pusey was apparently a classicist, but no one has ever read anything he wrote about the classics; in 1953, Harvard wanted a white-bread midwesterner as a president. Gay also resembled Neil Rudenstine, in that her days of academic research were long past. The excellence of Rudenstine’s writings on the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney had nothing to do with his hiring as Harvard’s president in 1991. He had been a popular Princeton administrator for years, and donors liked him.

The honest defense of Gay would have acknowledged that she was supposed to be more of a Rudenstine, and was instead being judged against Summers. Whether Gay was expected to have a Midas touch with donors, I do not know, but she was likely expected to have a kind of charisma with the social-justice and racial-equity constituencies reckoned to have power on American campuses. As a Black woman who studied the political effects of race and led initiatives on race, she was supposed to be safe against accusations that Harvard did not take seriously its mission to study and correct racial issues.

Harvard seems to have overestimated the power of those constituencies. The plagiarism accusations never impressed me much. Yes, Gay plagiarized, and students found guilty of the same crimes would be punished. But she is a quantitative social scientist, and I can see how quoting previous research with perfect fidelity might lead to a lifted sentence here and there. It is still plagiarism—and mortifying—but the stronger case against her was that her insistence on the centrality of race to Harvard’s mission conflicted with a university’s commitment to research and education of all types, not just those best studied with the bespoke tools developed for the study of race in America from her own rather narrow political perspective. (I say this as a onetime African American–studies major at Harvard, who regrets none of the education received from that department.)

[Yascha Mounk: Cancel culture cuts both ways]

Gay’s testimony before Congress and failure to speak to the issue of anti-Semitism in a convincing and satisfying way revealed another deficiency. When asked whether chanting anti-Semitic slogans would violate Harvard’s policies, she gave a legalistic and equivocal answer. This failing was harder to forgive. One of the first burdens of a university president is to interact with the outside world, in a way faithful to the mission and values of the university. Because universities are, as I have written previously, properly filled with nutjobs, extremists, and eccentrics, representing them publicly is a challenging task—at which Gay and the other university presidents failed horribly.

Compare Gay’s legalese to how Rudenstine answered a question about the limits of free speech. “I confess to be quite far on the spectrum along the way of defending First Amendment rights,” Rudenstine said, in a public appearance early in his presidency. He said that to stop speech would be to “[give] up a rather fundamental principle of the institution.” Rudenstine was on his own campus, not in a Capitol Hill star chamber, so the performances are not directly comparable. But note the fluency and humanity of his clearly unrehearsed reply: his commitment to his students’ freedom of speech, his simultaneous commitment to presiding over a campus marked by respect and decency.

In the month since Gay’s testimony, she has spoken with Harvard’s student newspaper contritely about her missteps, and she has issued statements. But since the testimony, I know of no public appearances or interviews in which Gay has offered herself to scrutiny and questioning that would allow a fair observer to decide whether she had the mettle to lead a diverse institution, filled with people who have different and incommensurable views, and who insist on being full members of the faculty or student body without having to compromise on those views.

Who would want this job, now that it is the most scrutinized position in higher education? Anyone who asks this question must lack a certain will to power, which is another entry-level criterion of a successful politician or university president. The person who might want this job is someone whose academic record is sterling, who has a history of speaking with poise about matters of public concern, and who does not mind being watched, closely, by the world. I find it interesting that Danielle Allen—a classicist with a bulletproof résumé, including publication in America’s greatest magazine, and demonstrated political ambition—has not been mentioned more often. Allen currently occupies the James Bryant Conant chair at Harvard. Last month, after Gay’s missteps, she wrote a Washington Post column that was a model of sanity and political caution. I wonder if the column was an audition. It acknowledged the failings of campus initiatives on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, and made Rudenstine-like noises about how best to pursue those underlying values.

[David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass]

Gay has said she will return to her tenured position in Harvard’s government department and the career in political science that she left several years ago to become an academic administrator. She waited too long to make this move. But she is young enough to have a great opportunity before her. Rufo and others took her down by questioning the quality of her work, and finding real flaws in it. The proper form of revenge would be to demonstrate every virtue she was accused of lacking—by publishing in top journals, by training another generation of scholars, and proving that the initiatives she championed as a dean and president were worthy of her emphasis. Or she could quietly draw a tenured professor’s salary and, like many tenured professors, do nothing. By the McGeorge Bundy standard, that might not be so bad, either: He left Harvard for the White House, and got us into Vietnam. Sometimes a padded room in an Ivy or ivory tower is safer for everyone.