JOIN THE PEACE AND CLIMATE MOVEMENTS!

A little contextAmericas fuel use approx. 20.6 million barrels of oil/day = of the worlds oil.40% of that is gasoline for motor vehicles.

This country pumps a staggering 8 billion pounds (4 million tons) of carbon into the atmosphere every day.

Military Energy Use: The numbers are elusive and enormous!Pentagon admits to 144 million barrels of fuel per year or 400,000 barrels/day, BUTMore likely 1 million barrels/day or 365 million barrels/year!Only fourteen countries exceed that number! As much as the whole country of Spain.

In ContextThe Pentagon is the largest single consumer of oil in the world, using enough energy in one year to run all the transit systems in the country for the next 14 to 22 years. (Barry Sanders, The Green Zone)It both purchases more light refined petroleum than any other single organization in the world, and also is the largest single polluter of any single agency or organization in the world. (BS)

The PollutionIf estimate half as jet fuel, must correct: > 650 million pounds or 325,000 tons/day or over 100 million tons/year CO2 equivalent.This is about 8% of the nations total carbon emissions.

M-1 Abrams Tank: 0.2 mpg or 252 gallons/hr. Army uses 1800 of them and they require a fleet of 2,000 support trucks .

USS Independence Aircraft carrier uses 5,600 gallons an hour = 112,000 tons of CO2/hour.

F-15: 1600 gal jet fuel/hr. With afterburners 14,400 gal/hr equivalent to > 330 tons or 660,000 pounds of CO2 equivalent/hr!

Principle gas hog award goes to B-52 Stratocruiser: uses 3,334 gal/hr STANDARD fuel use producing 200,000 pounds/hr CO2 equivalent.

It requires in-air refueling by KC-10 Extender aircraft using 2,050 gallons per hour = 120,000 lb or 60 tons CO2 equivalents/hour.

War, the militarys product!In the first three weeks of combat in Iraq, , the Army calculated its branch alone required more than 40 million gallons of fuel. If assume 1/4 was jet fuel = 600 million pounds of CO2 equivalent.Non-jet fuel produced 660 million pounds of CO2.= 600,000 tons of CO2!

The meaning of shock & awe.

The Problem:Even if every person in America decided to stop driving today, and even if every polluting factory in the country voluntarily shut down its operations right now, the land and the animals and the water and the air those things that we generally include by referring to them as the environment would still face a most serious assault. And, ironically, that greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency, that one agency in business to protect us from our enemies, the Armed Forces of the United States. (Barry Sanders, The Green Zone)

http://www.pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison.aspx

http://nationalpriorities.org/en/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

Proposed Cuts to Pentagon SpendingPotential Annual SavingsEnd the U.S. war in Afghanistan$86 billionEliminate one-third of the U.S. military bases in Europe and Asia$10 billionEliminate military waste and unnecessary weapon systems:Drastically reduce the nuclear warhead arsenal as a major step on the path to nuclear abolition$20 billionStop R&D and procurement of unnecessary weapons$9 billionEliminate two active Air Force wings and two carrier groups that are not needed to address current and probable future threats$8 billionAchieve savings from eliminating inefficiencies to reduce overall military spending, rather than increasing other Pentagon expenditures$28 billionScale back outsourcing to military contractors by 15 percent$40 billionEnd Foreign Military Financing$5 billionTotal$198 billion/year

How Many Jobs Can $1 Billion Buy?Education Health Care Clean Energy Consumption MilitarySource: Pollin & Garrett-Peltier, 2009

The Purpose:The de-facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends we will do a fair amount of killing. -- quote from a former officer at the Pentagon in charge of thinking about future warfare in the 1990s from the military Parameters Magazine, excerpted by Susan George of the Transnational Institute.

The vicious cycle: burning oil in war for oil.

Cutting the military and stopping war:Creates jobs.Supports children, the elderly and our economy.Stops climate change.

Its time to unite our efforts.The fact is that we cant stop war as long as the world economy is dependent on fossil fuels.And we cant reverse climate change and build sustainable economies unless we stop war.

*Opportunity costs:: the extreme excess of this institution is immediately apparent. And when we hold this up in contrast to the levels spent on and cut from social programs, it becomes clear that we our poor, our elderly, our children, our communities, our veterans are paying the price of a massive Pentagon budget, and of wars and occupations waged around the world that have devastated countries across the globe.

Before delving into the issue of military spending I, and many of our allies, take issue with Pentagon spending first from a practical stance: the pentagon budget is MASSIVE, more than the total budgets of the next 13 biggest militaries in the world. **Well over half of the Discretionary Spending goes towards so-called defense which includes all of the Pentagons underlying costs, international security assistance, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the two of which came to $159 billion back in 2011. This total number comes in at over $700 billion a year.[1] [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/**But wont cutting these programs eliminate jobs? The Budget for All coalition believes strongly that in order to turn our economy around, we have to invest in our communities, not in more wars. That means more spending on job creation, not cutting social programs that serve communities and employ people. While civilian jobs are being lost as a result of cuts to the Pentagon, as you can see other sectors are far more efficient and directly benefit our society. The ratio of education to military jobs per dollar is at least 2.5:1.