The Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy. In 1940, the US military consumed one percent of the country's total energy usage; by the end of World War II, the military's share rose to 29 percent... oil is indispensable for war.
At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army's armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.
The US Air Force is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds.
The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving!
A quarter of the world's jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War (1941-1945) - an astounding 2.6 billion gallons!
Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. While many of us assiduously reduce our carbon footprint through simpler living, eating locally, recycling and reusing, energy conservation, taking public transportation, installing solar panels, and so on, the single largest institutional polluter and contributor to global warming - the US military - is immune to climate change concerns. The military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body.
And oil security comprises both military protection against sabotage to pipelines and tankers and also US-led wars in oil-rich regions to assure long-term access. Nearly 1,000+ U.S. military bases trace an arc from the Andes to North Africa across the Middle East to Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea, sweeping over all major oil resources - all related, in part, to projecting force for the sake of energy security. Is is estimated that about 20% of the conventional DoD budget is attributable to the objective of oil security.
Just how much petroleum the Pentagon consumes is one of the best-kept secrets in government. More likely, no one in DoD knows precisely. By best expert estimates, the US military consumes as much as one million barrels of oil per day and contributes 5 percent of current global warming emissions... (that's 1.4 million active duty military personnel, or .0002 percent of the world's population, generating 5 percent of climate pollution... and military fuel is more polluting because of the fuel type used for aviation). The United States contributes more than 30 percent of global warming gases to the atmosphere, generated by five percent of the world's population and U.S. militarism.
But the United States has the wealth (currently larding the defense budget) and the technical capacity to revolutionize our energy economy and turn it within a few decades into an economy based on efficiency and renewable energy sources, thus removing a critical demand factor of our Goliath military.
Projected full costs of the Iraq war (estimated $3 trillion) would cover "all of the global investments in renewable power generation" needed between now and 2030 to reverse global warming trends.
Between 2003-2007, the war generated at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, more each year of the war than 139 of the world's countries release annually. Rebuilding Iraqi schools, homes, businesses, bridges, roads and hospitals pulverized by the war, and new security walls and barriers will require millions of tons of cement, one of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the entire world spent on renewable energy investment. By 2008, the Bush administration had spent 97 times more on military than on climate change. As a presidential candidate, President Obama pledged to spend $150 billion over ten years on green energy technology and infrastructure - less than the United States was spending in one year of the Iraq war.
Martin Luther King once said.. "Any nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Our cultural competence for high-tech war may be our society's nemesis unless we do critical soul searching about our cultural and personal values and actively engage in transforming them.
