{"id":6714,"date":"2010-04-13T09:33:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T18:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=6714"},"modified":"2010-04-13T09:33:37","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T18:03:37","slug":"a-dirty-little-secret-of-capitalism-the-u-s-military-is-one-of-the-world%e2%80%99s-largest-polluters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=6714","title":{"rendered":"A Dirty Little Secret of Capitalism: The U.S. Military Is One of the World\u2019s Largest Polluters"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/revcom.us\/a\/199\/military-en.html<\/a><\/p>\n

A Dirty Little Secret of Capitalism: The U.S. Military Is One of the World\u2019s Largest Polluters<\/h2>\n

The U.S. military is not only the main enforcer of the system that is plundering the earth\u2019s environment and its people\u2014it is also the single largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. And the U.S. military and its global operations are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions contributing to global climate change.<\/p>\n

Estimates are that as of 2004, the U.S. military consumed 144 million barrels of oil a year\u2014or 395,000 barrels per day. Fifty percent of the Pentagon\u2019s energy consumption is accounted for by jet fuel\u2014one of the single most carbon polluting fuels in existence. Many of its vehicles consume so much fuel their consumption is measured in gallons burned per minute instead of miles per hour. The B1-B Lancer bomber, for example, burns 59 gallons a minute. The Abrams tank meanwhile goes \u00bd mile on a gallon of fuel. The U.S. soldier is the most gas guzzling, carbon polluting, environment destroying combatant in the history of warfare. A report from Oil Change International found that the carbon emissions produced by the military from the war in Iraq alone \u201cequals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the U.S. this year\u2026 If the war was ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more carbon dioxide each year than 139 of the world\u2019s nations do annually.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now the military has been announcing how they are \u201cgoing green\u201d. And the reality is that the defense department is developing and using some renewable power. The twist is what this renewable power is used for. One sharp example\u2014the U.S. Navy base torture center in Guant\u00e1namo is powered by a wind\/diesel plant. So while prisoners are locked away indefinitely without charge and tortured, the military carrying out the torture is using \u201cgreen technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

The military motivation for \u201cgoing green\u201d is to cut dependency on \u201cforeign oil\u201d and to prepare for the danger of dwindling oil reserves in the future. At the same time, because biofuels haven\u2019t proved practical for powering its war fighting machines, the military is moving to rely more on synfuels\u2014that is, synthetic fuels made from coal, oil shale and biomass. These are dirty fuels, producing more carbon than regular oil and gas. Claiming to \u201cgo green\u201d (to defend U.S. interests), the U.S. military is a major source of climate change while warring on the planet\u2014in part fueled by the drive to dominate and exploit the world\u2019s fossil fuel energy reserves.<\/p>\n

In addition to carbon emissions, the U.S. military is also one of the world\u2019s major sources of other kinds of pollution and toxic waste. U.S. military bases, in the U.S. and especially worldwide, have spilled, dumped and left a toxic mess of petroleum products, solvents, chemical defoliants and heavy metals contaminating the soil, groundwater and waterways. In the U.S. as of 2004, 10% of \u201csuperfund\u201d sites (the most polluted sites needing clean-up) were created by the military.<\/p>\n

U.S. wars, invasions, and weapons testing sites have wreaked much worse havoc. They have caused untold devastation to people and the environment over decades. This includes the results from America dropping two atomic bombing on Japan\u2014bombs which poisoned the people and countryside with radiation, in addition to killing over 100,000 people. During its war against Vietnam, they sprayed \u201cagent orange\u201d on the trees in the countryside to remove \u201cthe cover\u201d of the guerrilla soldiers\u2014this resulted in 400,000 [!] deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects. More recently, U.S. use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for target practice contaminated the soils and seas, and its illegal use of depleted uranium weapons in both wars against Iraq caused cancer rates and birth defects to skyrocket there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/revcom.us\/a\/199\/military-en.html A Dirty Little Secret of Capitalism: The U.S. Military Is One of the World\u2019s Largest Polluters The U.S. military is not only the main enforcer of the system that is plundering the earth\u2019s environment and its people\u2014it is also the single largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. And the U.S. military and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A Dirty Little Secret of Capitalism: The U.S. Military Is One of the World\u2019s Largest Polluters”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6716,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6714\/revisions\/6716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}