Professor Neta Crawford (Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and Professorial Fellow of Balliol) has won the 2024 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
She has received the prize for the ideas in her book The Pentagon, Climate Change and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of Military Emissions (MIT Press, 2022), in which she argues that the US military must reduce its dependence on fossil fuels so that the world can effectively address climate change.
The US military is the world’s largest single institutional producer of greenhouse gases, Professor Crawford found. Between 1975 and 2022, its emissions averaged 81 million metric tons of greenhouse hydrocarbons a year – more than most countries. After it reduced operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, its emissions dropped to an annual average of 51 million metric tons, a level that still poses more risk to human existence than most military conflicts. ‘The Pentagon looks at the world in terms of threats but doesn’t see its own emissions as part of the problem,’ she said. ‘If it’s going to successfully switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, it must stop defending oil-rich countries and develop a different approach to national security.’
Professor Crawford is the first scholar to thoroughly assess the US military’s global emissions profile and weigh its implications, said Charles Ziegler, who directs the Grawemeyer world order award. ‘She convincingly explains how the military’s dependence on fossil fuels and consequent need to defend the sources of those fuels leads to a cycle of demand, consumption, militarisation and conflict,’ Ziegler said. ‘She also explains how the Pentagon can do more to make life on our planet sustainable.’
Professor Crawford has been Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford since 2021. She also codirects the Costs of War project, a non-partisan effort at Brown University assessing the human and financial costs of US wars. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year; and she won an International Studies Association distinguished scholar award in 2018.
Charles Grawemeyer set up the Grawemeyer Awards programme in 1984 to recognise the power of creative thought and underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world. The annual $100,000 prizes honour seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.