The US-Israel War on Iran Is Burning Through the Carbon Budget at a Staggering Rate

The bombs falling on Iran are doing more than destroying infrastructure and killing people. They are quietly dismantling something else: the planet's remaining margin for avoiding catastrophic warming. A new analysis finds that the US-Israel war on Iran has generated approximately 5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in just two weeks, a pace that outstrips the annual carbon output of 84 countries combined. For a conflict that has barely registered in climate policy circles, the numbers are a jarring reminder of how thoroughly war escapes the accounting systems the world relies on to track its environmental future.

The analysis arrives at a moment when the global carbon budget, the total amount of CO2 and equivalent gases humanity can still emit before locking in 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, is already running dangerously thin. Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have estimated that at current emission rates, that budget could be exhausted within a decade. Pouring 5 million tonnes into that shrinking pool in a fortnight, through the fuel burned by warplanes, the manufacturing chains behind missiles and drones, the fires ignited by strikes on oil and industrial facilities, and the long-tail emissions from destroyed infrastructure, compresses that timeline in ways that rarely make the front page.

Understanding why war is so carbon-intensive requires looking past the obvious images of explosions. Modern aerial campaigns depend on fighter jets that burn extraordinary quantities of aviation fuel. A single F-35 sortie consumes roughly 5,600 liters of fuel per hour of flight. Multiply that across hundreds of sorties, add the logistics chains supplying forward bases, factor in the energy embedded in precision-guided munitions that cost millions of dollars and enormous industrial energy to manufacture, and the emissions profile of a two-week air campaign becomes staggering before a single oil facility is touched.

Then there are the fires. Strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure, refineries, and storage facilities release not just CO2 but methane and black carbon, potent short-lived climate pollutants that punch well above their weight in near-term warming. Black carbon, the sooty particulate released by burning fossil fuel infrastructure, can settle on Arctic and Himalayan ice, accelerating melt cycles in ways that persist long after the flames are extinguished. The Middle East, already one of the regions most acutely vulnerable to heat stress and water scarcity, becomes what the analysis describes as a gigantic environmental sacrifice zone, absorbing both the immediate violence and the slower, invisible violence of climate disruption.

What makes this particularly difficult to address is structural. Military emissions have historically enjoyed a protected status in international climate agreements. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol explicitly exempted military operations from national emissions reporting requirements, and while the Paris Agreement technically closed that loophole by requiring countries to report all emissions, enforcement is essentially nonexistent. The United States military is, by some estimates, one of the largest institutional emitters on the planet, yet its wartime emissions appear in no binding treaty framework. War is, in climate accounting terms, largely invisible.

The systems-level consequences of this conflict extend beyond the immediate emissions. Iran is a significant oil producer, and sustained damage to its energy infrastructure creates ripple effects through global energy markets. If Iranian output is disrupted at scale, oil prices rise, which historically incentivizes production increases elsewhere, including from higher-carbon sources like tar sands and deepwater drilling. The short-term geopolitical logic of degrading Iranian energy capacity could, paradoxically, accelerate global emissions by reshuffling production toward dirtier alternatives. This is a feedback loop that no climate model currently running is designed to capture, because climate models do not simulate wars.

There is also the reconstruction problem. Rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, whether in Iran or in any conflict zone, is itself an emissions-intensive process. Cement production alone accounts for roughly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. Every bridge, power plant, and refinery that must be rebuilt from rubble represents a fresh emissions charge against a budget that is already overdrawn. The climate cost of this war will not end when the last missile is fired.

The deeper issue is one of political will and institutional design. Climate diplomacy has spent three decades building frameworks premised on the cooperation of nation-states acting in good faith during peacetime. War shatters that premise entirely. As conflicts multiply and intensify in a warming world, the feedback between geopolitical instability and climate disruption grows tighter. A hotter planet produces more resource scarcity, more displacement, and more conditions for conflict. More conflict produces more emissions. The loop closes on itself, and the accounting systems built to track our way out of the crisis were never designed to follow it there.

The question that deserves urgent attention is not just how many tonnes this particular war has emitted, but whether the international community is capable of building climate accountability frameworks that survive contact with the reality of armed conflict.