BY JOYCE NELSON

With both France and the UK now “at war” with ISIS in Syria and joining the U.S.-led bombing mission, it’s not likely that there are many voices at the COP21 climate change negotiations in Paris who would dare to discuss what a few critics have called “the elephant in the room” – the fact that the military is not just the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products, but the greatest source of global warming and climate change.

In fact, even if the delegates wanted to formally discuss that issue, they are prevented from doing so “by demand” of the U.S. government – at least in any official capacity at conferences such as Paris COP21.

In a remarkable piece originally published by the International Action Center, Sara Flounders wrote in 2014: “There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change. It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction [my emphasis].”

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