F - 35 Lightning II Stealth Fighter Jet at a cost of $115 million each
From an Article by Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, June 12, 2019
Failing to curb the U.S. military’s fossil fuel use, Costs of War Project co-director warns, “will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios” forecast by scientists.
From the 2001 launch of the so-called War on Terror to 2017, the Pentagon generated at least 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—with annual rates exceeding the planet-warming emissions of industrialized countries such as Portugal or Sweden—according to new research.
Boston University professor Neta C. Crawford details the U.S. Department of Defense’s massive contributions to the global climate emergency in a paper (pdf) published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
“The U.S. military’s energy consumption drives total U.S. government energy consumption,” the paper reads. “The DOD is the single largest consumer of energy in the U.S., and in fact, the world’s single largest institutional consumer of petroleum.”
“Absent any change in U.S. military fuel use policy, the fuel consumption of the U.S. military will necessarily continue to generate high levels of greenhouse gases,” the paper warns. “These greenhouse gases, combined with other U.S. emissions, will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios that the military predicts and that many climate scientists say are possible.”
Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project, estimates U.S. military emissions—which largely come from fueling weapons and equipment as well as operating more than 560,000 buildings around the world—from 1975 to 2017, relying on data from the Energy Department because the Pentagon does not report its fuel consumption numbers to Congress.
In the paper, she also examines patterns of military fuel use since 2001 in relation to emissions and the Pentagon’s views on “climate change as a threat to military installations and operations, as well as to national security, when and if climate change leads mass migration, conflict, and war.”
Writing about her research for The Conversation Wednesday, Crawford noted that DOD’s annual emissions have declined since reaching a peak in 2004, as the Pentagon has, over the past decade, “reduced its fossil fuel consumption through actions that include using renewable energy, weatherizing buildings, and reducing aircraft idling time on runways.”
The paper’s opening summary outlines four major benefits of further decreasing DOD’s fossil fuel use:
>>> First, the U.S. would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This would thereby mitigate climate change and its associated threats to national security.
>>> Second, reducing fossil fuel consumption would have important political and security benefits, including reducing the dependence of troops in the field on oil, which the military acknowledges makes them vulnerable to enemy attacks. If the U.S. military were to significantly decrease its dependence on oil, the U.S. could reduce the political and fuel resources it uses to defend access to oil, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where it concentrates these efforts.
>>> Third, by decreasing U.S. dependence on oil-rich states the U.S. could then reevaluate the size of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region.
>>> Finally, by spending less money on fuel and operations to provide secure access to petroleum, the U.S. could decrease its military spending and reorient the economy to more economically productive activities.
Crawford, in her piece for The Conversation, concluded that “climate change should be front and center in U.S. national security debates. Cutting Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions will help save lives in the United States, and could diminish the risk of climate conflict.”
She is far from the first to highlight how the Pentagon is fueling the world’s climate crisis and call for urgent reforms. Just last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a climate “resiliency and readiness” plan for the U.S. military as part of her 2020 campaign for president. However, as Common Dreams reported at the time, anti-war critics of Warren’s plan charged that “trying to ‘green’ the Pentagon without addressing the destructive impacts of its bloated budget and American imperialism is a misguided way to combat the emergency of global warming.”
Author and advocate Stacy Bannerman, in an op-ed for Common Dreams last year, warned that “if we don’t get serious about stopping the United States War Machine, we could lose the biggest battle of our lives.”
“In order to achieve the massive systemic and cultural transformations required for mitigating climate change and advancing climate justice,” Bannerman wrote, “we’re going to have to deal with the socially sanctioned, institutionalized violence perpetrated by U.S. foreign policy that is pouring fuel on the fire of global warming.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
See Also: America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight, David Axe, The Daily Beast, 06.14.19
The F-35 fighter jet planes have had several previously unreported ‘category 1’ flaws — military parlance for issues that can prevent the pilots from accomplishing their mission.
Point Your RSS Reader to FrackCheckWV.net/feed/
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Charlottesville Divests From Weapons And Fossil Fuels
By David Swanson, World Beyond War.June 15, 2019
On the evening of June 3, 2019, the City Council of Charlottesville, Va., voted to divest the funds in its operating budget from weapons dealers and fossil fuel producers. Here’s the resolution as passed by the City Council: PDF. The city has also committed to taking the same step with its retirement fund by this coming autumn.
The proposal to do this was brought to the city in March by a coalition of groups called Divest Cville, which attended and spoke at city council meetings (see videos), held rallies, wrote letters, made flyers, bought ads, produced responses to possible objections, met with the City Treasurer, and presented a petition.
David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, one of the organizations involved, said that combining weapons with fossil fuels was not just a matter of listing the two worst investments, but was a step intentionally taken to highlight the connections between the two industries.
A major motivation behind some wars is the desire to control resources that poison the earth, especially oil and gas. In fact, the launching of wars by wealthy nations in poor ones does not correlate with human rights violations or lack of democracy or threats of terrorism, but does strongly correlate with the presence of oil.
Divest Cville made the following case:
U.S. weapons companies supply deadly weapons to numerous brutal dictatorships around the globe, and companies Charlottesville currently has public funds invested in include Boeing and Honeywell, which are major suppliers of Saudi Arabia’s horrific war on the people of Yemen.
The current federal administration has labeled climate change a hoax, moved to withdraw the U.S. from the global climate accord, attempted to suppress climate science, and worked to intensify the production and use of warming-causing fossil fuels, with the burden therefore falling on city, county, and state governments to assume climate leadership for the sake of their citizens’ wellbeing and the health of local and regional environments.
Militarism is a major contributor to climate change, and the City of Charlottesville had already urged the U.S. Congress to invest less in militarism and more in protecting human and environmental needs.
Continuing on the current course of climate change will cause a global average temperature rise of 4.5ºF by 2050, and cost the global economy $32 trillion dollars.
Five-year averages of temperature in Virginia began a significant and steady increase in the early 1970s, rising from 54.6 degrees Fahrenheit then to 56.2 degrees F in 2012, and the Piedmont area has seen the temperature rise at a rate of 0.53 degrees F per decade, at which rate Virginia will be as hot as South Carolina by 2050 and as northern Florida by 2100;
Economists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have documented that military spending is an economic drain rather than a jobs-creation program, and that investment in other sectors is economically beneficial.
Satellite readings show water tables dropping worldwide, and more than one in three counties in the United States could face a “high” or “extreme” risk of water shortages due to climate change by the middle of the 21st century, while seven in ten of the more than 3,100 counties could face “some” risk of shortages of fresh water.
Wars are often fought with U.S.-made weapons used by both sides. Examples include U.S. wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, the Iran-Iraq war, the Mexican drug war, World War II, and many others.
Heat waves now cause more deaths in the United States than all other weather events (hurricanes, floods, lightning, blizzards, tornados, etc.) combined, and dramatically more than all deaths from terrorism. An estimated 150 people in the United States will die from extreme heat every summer day by 2040, with almost 30,000 heat-related deaths annually.
Local government investing in companies producing weapons of war implicitly supports federal war spending on those same companies, many of which depend on the federal government as their primary customer.
Between 1948 and 2006 “extreme precipitation events” increased 25% in Virginia, with negative impacts on agriculture, a trend predicted to continue, and global sea level is projected to rise an average of at least two feet by the end of the century, with rising along the Virginia coast among the most rapid in the world.
Weapons companies that Charlottesville can commit to not investing in produced the weapons brought to Charlottesville in August 2017.
Fossil fuel emissions must be cut by 45% by 2030 and to zero by 2050 in order to hold warming to the 2.7 ºF (1.5 ºC) goal targeted in the Paris Accord.
Climate change is a serious threat to the health, safety and welfare of the people of Charlottesville, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that climate change poses a threat to human health and safety, with children being uniquely vulnerable, and calls failure to take “prompt, substantive action” an “act of injustice to all children.”
The rate of mass shootings in the United States is the highest anywhere in the developed world, as civilian gun manufacturers continue to reap enormous profits off bloodshed that we do not need to invest our public dollars in.
DivestCville is sponsored by: Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, World BEYOND War.
Also endorsed by: Indivisible Charlottesville, Casa Alma Catholic Worker, RootsAction, Code Pink, Charlottesville Coalition For Gun Violence Prevention, John Cruickshank of the Sierra Club, Michael Payne (candidate for City Council), Charlottesville Amnesty International, Dave Norris (former Charlottesville Mayor), Lloyd Snook (candidate for City Council), Sunrise Charlottesville, Together Cville, Sena Magill (candidate for City Council), Paul Long (candidate for City Council), Sally Hudson (candidate for state delegate), Bob Fenwick (candidate for City Council).
https://popularresistance.org/charlottesville-divests-from-weapons-and-fossil-fuels/