The United States Army is set to receive two 6.5-megawatt solar installations at its Fort Johnson location in Louisiana, pv magazine reported.
The solar arrays are being built by Onyx Renewables, Northern Sun Energy, and Castillo Engineering.
The move toward renewable energy is significant, as the U.S. military is a massive source of planet-overheating air pollution and other types of pollution. The negative impact of the U.S. military on our planet is so outsized, in fact, that it has led many experts to identify it as the world's biggest polluter.
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One such expert, Oxford University political scientist Neta C. Crawford, explained to Mother Jones that "the U.S. military is the largest user of fossil fuels and energy in the U.S. government [with emissions totals] larger than the emissions of most countries. That does not include the emissions caused by the destruction of property — the burning of infrastructure, including cities — that the U.S. may engage in when they make war."
Even worse, our military has historically been legally unaccountable for the damage it causes to our planet. In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a landmark international treaty intended to reduce planet-overheating pollution, the United States lobbied for its military to be exempt from the agreement.
There are also all the other types of pollution that the U.S. military unleashes on civilians, at home and abroad. A recent report from the Department of Defense revealed that hundreds of military bases located on U.S. soil have been poisoning that very soil — as well as all of the surrounding drinking water — by leaching toxic chemicals on a regular basis.
And, of course, the harm that the military has done with nuclear testing alone is in many ways irreversible and still being felt by the communities where that testing occurred.
These latest developments by the Army — which are expected to be completed during the first quarter of 2025 — are part of a wider goal to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity at all federal buildings by 2030.
That the military now appears to be moving toward renewable energy for some of its installations is a step in the right direction — but the United States clearly has quite a long way to go if it wants to truly reckon with the damage that its military does to our environment.
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