How Israel Is Fueling The Climate Crisis
A January 13, 2025 letter from our Organizing & Advocacy Director, Iman.
The climate crisis is here. Fires have engulfed Los Angeles, burning homes to the ground and even forcing hospital patients to evacuate.
The fiery scenes immediately made me think of Palestine, where Israel bombs and burns our people alive in the cruelest acts of genocide. I cannot forget our martyr Shaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old patient at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex who Israel burned alive while he still had an IV in his arm.
Israel’s Bombs Affect Climate Change
With our tax dollars and U.S.-made bombs, Israel dropped 75,000 metric tons of bombs on Gaza in a year. That’s the equivalent of five Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Destruction on that scale impacts all of life on Earth. Dropping bombs accelerates climate change.
We will continue to pay for the genocide for the rest of our lives. This new era of climate chaos is fueled by U.S. imperialism. Research revealed that 99% of GLOBAL CO2 emissions in the first 120 days of the genocide were due to Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza. Almost half of those 281,315 metric tons of CO2 emissions were contributed by US cargo ships transporting weapons to Israel.1
In the first two months of the genocide alone, Israel emitted as many CO2 emissions as:
- 31,654,664 gallons of gasoline consumed
- 312,488,893 pounds of coal burned
- 37,780 homes’ total energy use for one year2
Experts believe the true carbon footprint of war is 5-8x higher when you include the entire supply chain of war.3
The world is burning, and our tax dollars are fueling it.
🚨 The clock has run out. The climate catastrophe has accelerated, and many Americans don’t even realize it yet. If you’ve ever wondered what your life could look like if we stopped sending money to Israel and funded community care instead, we’ve crunched the numbers for you.
How The Not My Tax Dollars Map Works
The map shows how much money people in your city or state were forced to pay in federal tax dollars in 2024. We just updated our Not My Tax Dollars map to reflect the $17.9 billion of our tax dollars sent to the Israeli military in 2024, a 542% increase from 2022, before the genocide.
See the numbers for yourself—and share them with your friends, family, and community members. Read more about our methodology here.
Example: Los Angeles taxpayers paid ~$238 million to arm Israel.
If those Los Angeles federal tax dollars funded community care instead, our government could have powered 680,000 homes in Los Angeles with solar electricity for a year—about half the households in LA. It also could have equipped the LA Fire Department with desperately needed funding to fight fires. Instead the state has exploited incarcerated firefighters through prison slave labor.
Our newest team member, Dani, fled the fires with Shaban on their mind. As a Palestinian American, they rang the alarm bells to help Angelinos connect the dots that our tax dollars are fueling climate catastrophe, and our government won’t save us.
Escalate for Gaza and all of humanity.
Climate justice goes hand in hand with Palestinian liberation and returning the land to the care of Indigenous peoples.
Look up your city on our newly updated Not My Tax Dollars map, and then share it with everyone you know. I don’t just mean online. Many people have no idea where their tax dollars go because they’re not on social media, or they’re not seeing censored content.
Talk to your people with care, and build awareness in your community with the resources on our site.
Friend, we know climate disasters hit marginalized communities the hardest. This is the time to have conversations with your neighbors and build networks to care for one another.
Onward to liberation,
IMAN ABID
Organizing & Advocacy Director
Footnotes
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/emissions-gaza-israel-hamas-war-climate-change
- https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator#results
- https://ceobs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Under-the-radar_the-carbon-footprint-of-the-EUs-military-sectors.pdf