Rock legend Neil Young told radio host Howard Stern on Tuesday that the “free world” ought to fight climate change rather than the Islamic State, or ISIS. Visiting the Howard Stern Show for a long-awaited interview, Young slammed both Democrats and Republicans for ignoring the plight of the planet, suggesting that environmental damage from the “carbon footprint” of the U.S. military was a greater threat than Islamic terror in the Mideast.

The relevant portion of the interview (excerpted by Canada’s Sun News) begins at 50:14 in the video below:

YOUNG: The things that we don’t know, you know, we can do little things to fight climate change. And yet our army and our armed forces are the biggest CO2 providers into the world, they just…it’s amazing. And yet we are fighting what? ISIS… STERN: What do you think about that? YOUNG: …al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that have with all our big machines. We’re doing more damage to the earth with our wars.

Asked if he was “upset at all” about the situation in the Middle East, Young replied: “No. I don’t like war. “

Young’s sentiments appear to be shared widely within the Obama administration, including the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel warned Monday that climate change “poses immediate risks to US national security.”

Update: In one portion of the interview, Young actually suggests that the U.S. is worse than terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, because they have “one percent” of the carbon footprint of the American military.

Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak