Last Born In The Wilderness

[Intro: 12:11 | Outro: 1:00:08] In this episode, I speak with Oliver Belcher, Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University and co-author of ‘Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military’ with Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, Cara Kennelly. A summary of their research was published at The Conversation ‘US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must.’ This discussion is about the often obscured impacts the United States’ global military presence has on the planetary climate system at large. Oliver and his colleagues’ research points to the fact “[g]reenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military wer