Ho-Chih Lin presentation
November 13, 2024
Although I trained as a physicist, my work in this field began when I worked on the cinema documentary We Are Many – a film about the February 15th 2003 global anti-Iraq-War protest. While working on this movie, I met executive producer Deborah Burton of Tipping Point North South and that led me to join her work on thinking through ways to cutting global military spending.
We developed The Five Percent Formula proposal: effectively a formula to degrow military spending over 10 years and beyond back to that post-cold-war era of global military spending of only $1 trillion a year.
As we thought more of military spending and the economy, this led to our Green New Deal Plus proposal (Green New Deal that factors in the military economy) and our interests in placing the military in the degrowth narrative.
Before I begin, let’s remember the US military economy far outstrips other top military spenders by far, whether in terms of its size, employment share, military budgets, and number of military bases etc. Therefore, the US military economy is not just a HUGE issue for itself but also the rest of the world. This also means that IF THE USA CAN MAKE the CHANGE, IT WILL lead and INFLUENCE EVERYONE ELSE – as it sets the terms of reference for the global military economy.
So
Wars in Ukraine and Gaza are fuelling a new arms race. We are currently spending more than $2.4 trillion a year on the global military, at least a quarter of which goes to the arms industry. For top military spenders, such as United States and United Kingdom, more than half of national military spending goes to private military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.
The annual global military spend has increased by around 30% since 2014 and continues to increase. The war in Ukraine has also led to NATO calling for its members to increase military budgets further to 2% or more of GDP – had this been in place between 2021 and 2028, it would have resulted in an estimated total military expenditure of $11.8 trillion and a collective military carbon footprint of 2 billion metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. Totally incompatible with climate targets and net-zero by 2050.
But some, including the arms industry and its lifeblood, the oil industry, are more than happy with this status quo, making obscene profits while polluting and destroying the only habitat we have.
- The top 100 arms companies in the world made $592 billion in arms sales in 2021, the year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The top 20 alone accounts for two thirds of the total and come from just a handful of countries: US, China, Russia, UK, France and Italy.
And their profits have been soaring.
In terms of military carbon footprint, military spending positively correlates to military greenhouse gas emissions – so the more you spend on big ticket fossil-fuel intensive weaponry, the more emissions you emit (whether in production or in use). Arms manufacturing is a carbon-intensive part of the economy, and its inputs, such as primary metals, rubber, or chemicals are also very carbon-intensive. A recent study found that a percentage point rise in the military spending share of GDP leads to up to 2% rise in total national greenhouse gas emissions.
It is therefore imperative for us to overturn the economics of war and degrow the military economy.
Degrowth is a planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in rich countries to lower environmental pressures and inequalities while improving people’s well-being. So, if all areas of human activity must decarbonise and be considered for degrowth, why are we letting the oil dependent militaries follow a different path?
The IPCC ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’ report offers up ways to degrow the economy: We applied their model to the military economy. For example:
- Avoidlocking into expensive and gas-guzzling weapon systems.
- Substitutethe arms industry with the green economy. Many skills in the high-tech arms industry are interchangeable with those required by the clean-energy industry.
- Improve(by electrifying) the existing defensive weapons while gradually getting rid of offensive weapons, including nuclear weapons.
Military spending increases can lead to a crowd-out in green investment, and military spending is the least effective public spending to create jobs. Unlike other economic sectors, the military economy completely relies on military spending so the most effective way to degrow the military economy is to cut and divert military spending to deliver a Green New Deal, a shift of limited resources to fund urgently needed human needs, such as universal healthcare and the wholesale electrification of the society with 100% renewable energy.
Equally, we also need to find globally new money for climate finance to support the many climate-vulnerable nations at the sharp end of climate chaos, who have done nothing to cause it and do not have the resources to adapt or mitigate.
Just to give one example to put priorities in perspective. The F-35 fighter jet program will cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion over its lifetime: the money spent on that jet could fund any one of these
- international climate finance at $100bn per year for 20 years or
- global biodiversity conservation for the next 20 years or
- WHO funding for the next 1,000 years.
So rich nations are telling climate vulnerable nations they have no money. Yet if the current trend continues, between 2024 and 2030 we can expect to see more than $17 trillion spent on the global military. Rich countries spend 30 times as much on their militaries as international climate finance for climate vulnerable countries.
Historically, military spending has been central to re-enforcing power, poverty and unjust distribution of resources. And this is inextricably linked to the longstanding destructive role of those same nations’ corporate interests across the global south, notably through the extraction of resources. The old 7 colonial powers alone (US, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, UK and Spain) account for 80% of global arms export, mainly to the global South. The excessive military spending of many countries in the global South is the manifestation of this exploitation.
To conclude: to degrow the military economy is to create the “double dividend” for our global society: If the fossil-fuelled way of national defence is both ecologically damaging and psychologically flawed, then the possibility remains that we could live better and safer by spending less on militarism and reduce our impact on the environment at the same time.
Transform defence for sustainable human safety 