The Pentagon's recent announcement thatglobal warming poses a national-securityrisk should have set off the irony alarms.The Pentagon has as many as 1,000 bases inother countries, and maintaining these bases (andsending troops to and from them) leaves agigantic carbon footprint.
The U.S. armed forces consume about 14million gallons of oil per day, half of it in jet fuel.Humvees average 4 miles per gallon, while anApache helicopter gets half a mile per gallon.The Iraq War, which George W. Bushlaunched in part to protect vital oil supplies,consumed oil at a phenomenal rate.
At the start, in 2003, the United KingdomGreen Party estimated that the United States,Britain, and the minor parties of the “coalition ofthe willing” were burning the same amount offuel as the1.1 billion people of India.
U.S. forces in Iraq during 2007 consumed40,000 barrels of oil a day, all of which wastransported into the war zone from othercountries.
The U.S. Air Force uses 2.6 billion gallons ofjet fuel a year, 10% of the U.S. domestic market.
By the end of 2007, according to a report fromOil Change International by Nikki Reisch andSteve Kretzmann, the Iraq War had put at least141 million metric tons of carbon dioxideequivalent into the air, as much as addingtwenty-five million cars to the roads. TheIraq War by itself added more greenhouse gasesto the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world'snations.
When we are really serious about carbonfootprints, we will know the amount ofgreenhouse gases generated by eachplatoon sent to war, each bomb dropped, eachtank deployed.
However, today we know the carbon footprintof a bag of British potato chips from a Tescogrocery store in England, but war – that elephantin the greenhouse – remains unmeasured.Consider this one fact: More than 1.4 millionliters of bottled water per day are used by ourtroops, who need them to stay hydrated duringBaghdad’s 115-degree summer days. How muchfuel has been burned to get the water bottles intothe war zone?
When the Pentagon trumpets is efforts to saveenergy – as when it announced in January that itwas replacing 4,200 flourescent lights withlightemitting diode (LED) lights, saving 22 percentof the energy of the old ones – it’s a bad joke.Likewise, the solar array posted on the Pentagonroof is a mirage that is aimed at passengers in carsdriving on nearby highways.
The business of the Pentagon is still war,and the making of war destroys the earth.
So it has been since the dawn of the industrialage. Less than a hundred years ago, at thebeginning of World War I, the main motiveforce in battle was the horse and shoe leather, astroops in Europe marched off to battle on foot orhorseback. World War I quickly witnessed adramatic escalation in war’s carbon dioxideproduction with the advent of aerialbombardment, however, as well as increasing useof tanks. War is often a powerful technologicalmotor, and carbon-consumption innovator.World War II began with quarter-century oldbiplanes, and ended with jet-propelled fighters.Compared with World War II, the U.S. military inIraq and Afghanistan is using sixteen times morefuel per soldier, according to the Pentagon.The mechanization of the military providedmany more opportunities to increase carbondioxide production during the world wars of theearly twentieth century. World War II's Shermantank, for example, got 0.8 miles per gallon.
Seventy-five years later, tank mileage had notimproved: the 68-ton Abrams Tank got 0.5 milesper gallon.
Fighter jets typical subsonic fuel consumptionis 300 to 400 gallons per hour at full thrust (or100 gallons per hour at cruising speed) duringhundreds of hours' training, or combat missions.Blasting to supersonic speed on its afterburners,an F-15 Fighter can burn as much as four gallonsof fuel per second.
During the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. B-52s werein the air at all times, on the theory that anairborne fleet would prevent the Soviet Unionfrom obliterating the entire U.S. nuclear armedarmada on the ground. Each of these B-52sburned hundreds of gallons of fossil fuel per hourwhile aloft. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eightjet engines, consumes 500 gallons of jet fuel perminute, or 3,000 per hour. In a few minutes, aB-52 consumes what an average automobiledriver uses in a year.
…How many years of my riding a bike to workwould it take…to offset one F-15flying for an hour?Assuming a bike replaces a car that gets 25 miles pergallon, my daily commute of five miles would use agallon a week. That's nearly seven years to fuel afighter jet at top thrust for one hour. We don't havethat kind of time. Thermal inertia delivers the resultsof atmospheric change roughly a half century afterour burning of fossil fuels provokes them. Theweather today is reacting to greenhouse gasemissions from about 1960. Since then, the world'semissions have risen roughly 400 percent. The ColdWar, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War,and the Afghanistan War have all played their part.But we haven't even felt their full environmentaleffects yet.
Global warming has already accelerated beyondeven the predictions of pessimistic scientists. Thepolar ice caps are dissolving and the permafrost is
melting, injecting more carbon dioxide andmethane into the air. And as the ice caps melt, thesun reflects off the dark water instead of the whitesnow, and the atmosphere heats all the faster. Thissummer, large swaths of tundra have beenburning, adding still more greenhouse gases to theatmosphere.
Before the hot wind blows in our face, weneed to recognize the environmental insanityof war.
The Pentagon wants to go "green," though—andnot only with its light bulbs. It is also using solarenergy at some of its bases, and is even trying tomanufacture a synthetic fuel for the B-1 bomber.But we don't need a "green" military with high-mileage tanks, or bombers flying on biofuel.Anyway, war, for the foreseeable future, willdepend largely on fossil fuels. As the Pentagonnow tells us, we have no national security withoutclimate security. War has become the ultimateenvironmental oxymoron.
Instead, we need to address the reasonscountries and groups go to war: nationalism,religious fanaticism, tribalism, poverty—andscarcity of resources, like oil. And we can't do thatby consuming that oil in spasms of nationalism.
Peacemakers are often assumed to benaive dreamers. Given the environmentalcircumstances, however, a timely end to waris not naive, but necessary. The Earth can nolonger afford war.
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The CarbonFootprint of
WarBruce E. Johansen, The Progressive, Oct. 2009
The Earth Can NoLonger Afford War
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