The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored.  More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale. Guardian Doug Weir 9 Jan 2024 In early 2022, journalists began to ask us how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was affecting the climate crisis. While we could point to landscape fires, burning oil refineries and the thirst of diesel-hungry military vehicles, the emissions data they sought just wasn’t available. When it came to the reverberating consequences of Russia’s manipulation of Europe’s fossil fuel insecurity, or to the weakening of the international cooperation necessary for coordinated global climate action, our guesses were no better than theirs.

Two decades of international analysis and debate over the relationship between climate change and security has focused on how our rapidly destabilising climate could undermine the security of states. But it has largely ignored how national security choices, such as military spending or warfighting, can have an impact on the climate, and so undermine our collective security. With climate breakdown under way and accelerating, it is imperative that we are able to understand and minimise the emissions from all societal activities, whether in peacetime or at war. But when it comes to military or conflict emissions, this remains a distant goal.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has seen the first attempt to comprehensively document the emissions from any conflict, and researchers have had to develop their methodologies from scratch. Their latest estimate puts the total as equivalent to the annual emissions of a country like Belgium. Ukraine is not a one-off, with a similar clamour for emissions data around Israel’s war against Hamas. While the devastating ongoing conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar are yet to see attention on their emissions, the trend is clear: the carbon cost of conflict needs to be understood, just as the humanitarian, economic or wider environmental costs do. A proportion of those carbon costs come from military activities. For these, understanding is hampered by the longstanding culture of domestic environmental exceptionalism enjoyed by militaries, and how at the US’s insistence, this was translated into UN climate agreements. An exclusion to the 1997 Kyoto protocol became voluntary reporting under the 2015 Paris agreement. But when we began to collate and publish the emissions data that militaries report to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), we found that only a handful of countries publish even the bare minimum required by UN reporting guidelines. Many countries with large militaries publish nothing at all......read on     https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/09/emission-from-war-military-gaza-ukraine-climate-change

 None of the scholars forecast an imminent turn to autocracy in the U.S., and all were careful to say the U.S. experience today is in important ways different from devastating conditions that preceded the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and ‘30s. But in a series of interviews, experts who have studied the political and economic history of Europe traced dramatic and deeply troubling parallels between that era a century ago and this fraught American moment. As in Europe after World War I, “there’s kind of a disdain for democracy,” said John Connelly, the eminent historian of modern Europe. “There’s a willingness to think of going beyond the technicalities of a democratic system in order to solve problems. There’s a longing — there’s a respect for strong leadership that many believe is lacking in a standard liberal democracy.” The view was not unanimous. Jason Wittenberg, a political scientist who has studied European politics and dictatorships, insisted that the U.S. military and other institutions would not succumb to strongman rule.
“My bottom line is that fears about Trump are not entirely unfounded, but they’re massively overblown,” Wittenberg said. “Yes, he could do damage. But in the worst-case scenario, there’s just no plausible circumstance under which an illiberal government could be implemented. There’s no way it could happen.”

And yet, the cautious consensus that emerged from the interviews is that U.S. democracy is more vulnerable today than it has been since the Civil War more than 160 years ago. Several scholars believe the public’s frustration and polarization, incidents and threats of right-wing violence, and a radical new Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity from the law could precipitate a break with democracy. Because the forces of history are so complex, “I’m wary of trying to draw exact parallels,” said AJ Solovy, a Ph.D. student whose research is focused on German fascism. “But the Third Reich and Germany in the 1930s offer important, useful paradigms through which to understand this particular moment in the U.S. Even if there is not a one-to-one match, the themes that emerge — insecurity, crisis, a sort of existential political angst — can help explain why so many people are attracted to the MAGA movement.” Put another way: It’s not enough to look at how the leaders of anti-democratic movements might be alike. Instead, it’s essential to look at the broader conditions that allowed for the rise of those movements. 

Condition No. 1: An era of extraordinary instability, loss and perceived humiliation.....
Any discussion of 20th century fascism in Italy and Germany begins with World War I. The war brought a level of death and devastation that had never been seen before. New weapons technology turned portions of Europe into a killing field. Relentless shelling barrages didn’t merely maim and kill, but obliterated bodies on a mass scale......read on- 4 more conditions and the Conclusion           https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/09/09/fascism-shattered-europe-a-century-ago-and-historians-hear-echoes-today-in-the-u-s/