The $1 Trillion Pentagon Budget Will Make Its Emissions Higher Than the Entire Country of Ethiopia
By Patrick Bigger and Lorah Steichen
Following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, much of the press coverage has focused on its impacts to clean energy, access to healthcare, and tax cuts for billionaires. But one thing that has largely been lost in this cacophony of analysis is the massive spending boost the bill gives the Pentagon, and even less has been said about how that funding boost will exacerbate the climate crisis. It’s not good news.
The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. Its vast global operations—from jet fuel consumption and overseas deployments to domestic base maintenance—produce immense carbon pollution, as does the manufacturing of all the weapons, ships, and planes that it operates. Per the Transnational Institute, in 2023 the Pentagon spent approximately $860 billion, with carbon emissions estimated at nearly 152 megatons, including not just the Pentagon’s operations, but the full supply chain emissions from the U.S.’s vast Military Industrial Complex. The new Pentagon budget passed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act grows beyond $1 trillion in 2026—a 17% increase.
This escalation in military spending will likely lead to a proportional increase in carbon emissions. As such, this funding boost will drive an additional 26 megatons (Mt) of climate pollution (CO₂e) over the 2023 baseline—equivalent to the emissions of entire countries like Croatia or Lebanon—or the annual emissions of approximately 7 U.S. coal-fired power plants. That brings total Pentagon emissions to 178 megatons. Adding emissions of a country the size of Croatia might not sound like much, but in the context of the climate emergency the addition of any extra socially-unnecessary (much less harmful) greenhouse gases is reckless and irresponsible.
The human cost of this funding increase will be immense, not just in terms of for what that money might have been put used for, but in as far as direct harms. Using the 2023 EPA social cost of carbon, 2026 Pentagon emissions will cause $47 billion in economic damages (adjusted to 2025 dollars). The U.S. is already spending nearly $1 trillion per year on disaster recovery, much less the untold damage and misery that each additional 0.1 degree of warming will heap on the Global South who have done little to cause the climate crisis.
Total emissions of a staggering 178 megatons would make the US military and its industrial apparatus the 38th largest emitter in the world if it were its own nation, more than Ethiopia, a country of more than 135 million people.
While this is an approximate calculation based on a dollar to emissions ratio, it is also likely conservative because it does not include any supplemental funding that the Pentagon will receive, for example for military equipment sent to Israel and Ukraine, and more precise calculations would be challenging given the dearth of specifics on expenditures in the bill.
Why Budget Increases Drive Emissions
Military carbon emissions are closely tied to budget increases because:
More Aircraft, More Fuel: The U.S. military is the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, burning through nearly 300,000 barrels of oil a day, most of it jet fuel. Increased funding often translates into expanded air operations, new aircraft purchases, more drones and drone hours flown, and enhanced training or surveillance missions.
War Profiteers: A growing share of the Pentagon budget goes to private companies. From 2020 to 2024, over half of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending went to weapons contractors.These companies' emissions (Scope 3 for the DoD) are largely unreported, but they are massive—spanning weapons manufacturing, construction, data centers, and more.
Infrastructure Expansion: Budget increases may fund new domestic and overseas installations, requiring the use of more carbon, steel, and other industrial building materials, which are among the most carbon-intensive products globally. Recent analysis finds that the U.S. operates some 877 overseas military bases—thats 2.5 times more than the rest of the world combined.
Policy Implications
The United States is the largest historical contributor to the climate crisis, and rapid decarbonization is the only plausible way to stave off increasingly severe impacts of the climate crisis, like the flooding seen this week in Texas, or any of the myriad catastrophes seen around the globe in recent years, from flooding in Pakistan to scorching heatwaves in Europe.
Key policy takeaways:
The Big Beautiful Bill is a disaster for working people in general and it will continue to accelerate the climate crisis at precisely the time the U.S. needs to take the opposite approach by investing in renewable energy, winding down fossil fuels, and supporting communities that will be impacted by the transition to a zero carbon economy.
There is no plausible path to ‘greening’ the military; military operations, particularly flights and military industrial manufacturing, are highly polluting. The best- and only- pathway to reducing U.S. military emissions is through cutting the budget.
Invest in demilitarized climate resilience. The $150 billion increase witnessed just between 2023 and the Big Beautiful Bill could fund vast civilian adaptation and decarbonization—public transit, renewable energy, or climate-safe housing—each with far lower emissions and greater social return. The $47 billion a year in economic damages resulting from new Pentagon emissions alone could kickstart a social housing development authority that would create new green social housing in perpetuity, including nearly 2 million units in its first decade – an investment in genuine human security.