Bringing Climate Change to the Frontlines: The Fight to Get Militaries to Go Green

How to Save a Planet

Gimlet

Science, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Militaries around the world emit a lot of carbon, but they aren’t required to report these emissions directly…plus they aren’t exactly known for prioritizing climate change in their projections. Still, if we want to lower emissions and limit global warming, we’re going to need their help. So how exactly do you get an institution whose focus is national protection, to care about climate protection? This week we spoke with retired general Richard Nugee about when he first realized the dangers of climate change, his efforts to put it on the UK military’s agenda, and what it’s like to try and change an organization from the inside out. Guest: Richard Nugee Further Reading Go through Richard’s report and learn more about how the UK Ministry of Defense is approaching climate change and sustainability. Look at the US Department of Defense’s Climate Adaptation Plan, and the US Army’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2050. Calls to action Check out militaryemissions.org, it’s a website dedicated to putting an end to the discrepancies in today’s military emissions reports. If you are in the US military and looking for ways to make a difference, check out the US Army Environmental Command, whose goal is to provide environmental solutions for the Army and the nation as a whole. You can read more about what they do, internship opportunities, and upcoming events. Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram. This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by our intern Nicole Welch. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, Daniel Ackerman, and Hannah Chinn. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was James Gaines. Special thanks to Dr. Neta Crawford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to How To Save a Planet, I'm Alex Bloomberg and this is the show about what we need
0:06.6	to do to address climate change and how to make those things happen.
0:25.2	So we've had a lot of people on this podcast over the past year and a half, marine biologists,
0:29.7	bi-planned protestors and eel experts who sort of run the gamut, I guess you could say,
0:36.4	but our guest today is a first for the show. We're dragging with someone who knows
0:39.5	a thing or two about fighting the war against climate change with an emphasis on the war part.
0:45.4	My name is Richard Yuchi. I was a career soldier. I spent 37 years in the British Army and did a lot
0:53.6	of tours abroad, deployments to all sorts of countries including Iraq and Afghanistan,
0:59.0	Northern Ireland and so on. Since 2020, I've been persuading the UK Ministry of Defence to take
1:06.1	climate change seriously and to build a sustainability approach to everything that they do.
1:14.4	And this is no small feat because militaries are big carbon emitters. In the UK,
1:19.3	according to the Washington Post, the British military emits as much as the rest of the British
1:24.0	central government combined. In the US, according to research from Brown University,
1:28.9	the Department of Defence is the world's single largest institutional consumer of petroleum,
1:34.4	and the Pentagon, by itself, accounts for over half of the federal government submissions.
1:41.5	And in the US, the military budget is huge, three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
1:47.2	It is a lot of taxpayer money going to an institution that's contributing so much to climate change.
1:52.8	But historically, militaries in the US and in Europe haven't seen climate change as a priority.
1:58.8	And that was certainly the case for our guests today, Richard Newji, who went from being a career
2:03.8	as soldier who didn't think about sustainability to calling for a climate change awakening in the military.
2:12.0	And in today's episode, we're going to hear Richard's story. And I'm going to say up front,
2:16.1	it's pretty different than other stories we've heard on this program. Richard is a lifetime soldier
	...

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