War and Pollution
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War and Pollution
by Hobb Tue 8 Nov 2016 - 13:40
Toxicity seem to gather in certain spots.
The oil-sands of Alberta were not just environmentally polluting but the concentration of young men with fast cash also brought Mexican drug cartels selling crack and local pimps selling First Nation prostitutes. The tobacco smuggling routes into Canada during the 1990s where traceable by both the high-rates of execution-style murders and cancer rates left in their wakes.
The criminal wars of America don't just leave a trail of murder, chaos, rape and human rights violation, they are also environmental disasters. The occasional 'green' initiative by the US military - like the world’s largest solar photovoltaic system at the Neveda air-base where the drone assassination campaign is run or the world's largest wind/diesel hybrid plant located at the Guantánamo Bay torture-gulag - should not obscure that the US military is the single largest polluter and users of fossil fuel on the planet.
I have been collecting information on this subject for the past year. This is a semi-edited compilation of it.
OIL CONSUMPTION
Militaries with their massive fleets of high-performance, armoured vehicles and air-conditioned desert bases are the hungriest consumers of fossil fuels on the planet. Even outside of war, these vehicles are in constant use for training, mock battles, and international inter-operatabiltiy exercises.
An F-16 at peak thrust uses four gallons of jet fuel per second, one hour at this rate would uses what an average car uses in three years. During battle an Abrams tank uses 252 gallons of fuel per hour, 5 gallons for every mile traveled. Fuel usages for such military vehicles are in ‘gallons per minute’ and ‘barrels per hour’. Except for 80 nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers all US military vehicles run on oil. Even a single deployed US soldier requires 15 gallons a day; an average American uses 1.5 gallons.
Officially the U.S. military uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. This does not include fuel consumed by privatized contractors, leased facilities, and rented vehicles. Nor does it count oil that the military has obtained for free (such as the barrels received from Kuwait as gifts for liberating their kingdom in 1991); nor the fuel required by the massive infrastructure which produces and maintains military equipment; nor the fuel used to launch military satellites.
The Energy Bulletin (Feb. 17, 2007) estimates that the Pentagon's daily oil consumption - for its’ aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and military facilities - as 1 million barrels per day making it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. By comparison, the BP oil rupture was reported to be spewing 25-65 thousand barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico at its worst.
In 2003, as the military prepared for the Iraq invasion, the Army alone estimated it would consume more gasoline in the first three weeks of occupation than the Allied Forces used during the entirety of World War II. The US Navy, Air force and Marines did not provide public estimates. The military fuel requirement of the Iraq occupation was comparable to large, highly industrialized, oil-dependent nation suddenly appeared on Earth between 2003 and 2007.
At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision that the Pentagon had a blanket exemption from all international climate agreements. After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords. The USA emits 25% of world’s greenhouse gases, 35% if Pentagon is included. The U.S. military and its NATO allies comprise the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
SECURING THE OIL
Being so dependent on oil, the military must secure a steady supply which leads to vicious cycle of America’s global military empire being used primarily used to guard Big Oil’s refineries, pipelines, and supertankers. In order to fuel its war machine America props up the most reactionary petro-tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. To curry favour Washington arms the Middle East's repressive regimes with the latest weaponry while it imposes a phalanx of bases with American soldiers, mercenaries, and drones to guard the pumps, refineries, and supply lines of Exxon-Mobil, BP, and Chevron.
TOXIC BASES
The Pentagon is the world’s largest landlord much as the Catholic Pope was in the Middle Ages. The Pentagon is also the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined. So it is unsurprising that US military properties are some of the most toxic environments on the planet.
Pentagon military bases top the Enivomental Protection Agency (EPA) list of the most polluted places. More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. have soils and waters aquifers contaminated with toxic chemicals like the industrial degreaser Trichloroethylene, the rocket propellant Perchlorate and dumped jet fuel.
The U.S. Navy is the largest polluter in California, having created 100 toxic sites during the last 80 years, including spilling over 11,000 gallons of oil into the San Diego Bay in 1988. Fish in that bay contain high levels of mercury and radioactive compounds that are attributable to Navy pollution. The soil near a plant that manufactured depleted uranium rounds in Colonie, New York was found to have 500 times the amount of uranium that one could normally expect to find in soil.
Despite this the Pentagon has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases or to set new stricter pollution standards. (Washington Post, June 30, 2008)
One in ten Americans lives within ten miles of a military site that has been listed as a EPA priority cleanup site. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this poisoning. The Naval Air Station in Fallon, New York has the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. Residents suspect that the contamination of groundwater with radioactive materials and dumped fuel combined with heavy-scale use of radio and electronic emissions are responsible.
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of areas of land and water with radiation. Mountains of radioactive and toxic uranium tailings have been left on Indigenous land in the Southwest with more than 1,000 uranium mines have been abandoned on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.
Current US military bases in found in Japan, Puerto Rico, South Korea, the Philippines, and the former Yugoslavia leaving a global trail of toxic environmental footprints. Abandoned bases in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama and filled with buried barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of corroded rounds of ammunition, leaving them contaminated with millions of kilograms of toxic and potentially radioactive waste. The US military's legacy of chemical defoliants and tens of thousands of unexploded landmines and bombs also poisons these countries' environments. This has referred to as the US military's “pollute and run” policy.
The U.S. war in Vietnam left large areas so contaminated with the Agent Orange herbicide that more than 40 years later, dioxin contamination is 300x to 400x higher than “safe” levels with severe birth defects and high rates of cancer continuing into a 3rd generation of Vietnamese.
BURN PITS & DEPLETED URANIUM
When US bases are used in war their toxicity spikes because of the US military practice of using burn-pits. As this poisons soldiers on the base even the internal pulbications like the U.S. Air Force Times can run an editorial entitled “Stamp Out Burn Pits” (March 1, 2010) stating:
“A growing number of military medical professionals believe burn pits are causing a wave of respiratory and other illnesses among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Found on almost all U.S. bases in the war zones, these open-air trash sites operate 24 hours a day, incinerating trash of all forms — including plastic bottles, paint, petroleum products, unexploded ordinance, hazardous materials, even amputated limbs and medical waste. Their smoke plumes belch dioxin, carbon monoxide and other toxins skyward, producing a toxic fog that hangs over living and working areas.”
The Pentagon admits operating 84 “official” burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, CNN reported on October 15, 2010 that at least 221 burn pits were operated in Afghanistan alone.
The use of depleted uranium as ammunition for its high density has also been implicated in poisoning soldiers and civilians in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Depleted uranium emits radioactivity over a 4.5 billion year half-life
In the 'shock and awe' that began the Iraq invasion of 2003, eight hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched into Baghdad on March 20-21, approximately 1 every 4 minutes. Each 3,000-pound missile delivered 800 pounds of depleted uranium so in two days 320 tons of DU was dumped on Baghdad.
In areas where DU rounds have been used cancer rates have leapt by a factor of 10. Even before the full length of expected latency period in the development of cancer has passed, rates of cancer (especially childhood cancer) and congenital birth defects, as well as infant mortality and abnormal sex ratio in newborns, have all dramatically increased in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004.
This uranium was dug up by military-conscripted First Nations miners in the 1950s from hundreds of military mines in the heart of the Navajo Nation. As the New York Times states, “Navajo miners extracted some 4 million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons." Those same indigenous people, and their grown children, are falling sick from radiation poisoning incurred.
Controversy still surrounds this issue of DU's effects but using radioactive waste as ammunition seems emblematic of US military policy.
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION
During it's 5,000-year history, Iraq served as the breadbasket of the Middle East, the so-called 'fertile crescent', now after two American-led invasion it is an environmental catastrophe.. Iraq's arable and fertile land has become a desert wasteland where the slightest wind whips up a dust storm. The Iraqi Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of the land has severe desertification. A former food exporter, Iraq now imports 80 percent of its food.
A UN environmental report about the first Gulf War points to the damage inflicted by 70-ton tanks like the M-1 Abrams on the ecology of the desert: “Approximately 50% of Kuwait’s land area has had its fragile soil surface destroyed as scores of tanks moved out of that country each day and headed for Iraq.” Once the surface of the earth has broken apart, the wind has an easier job of eroding even more land mass and as organic matter oxidizes, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Add to this soil damage, base pollution and burn pits, the salting of the earth with tens of thousands of pounds of DU, the targeted bombing of cities' infrastructure leading to disease, the igniting of oil wells by Iraq to provide a smoke-screen against bombings.
The oil-sands of Alberta were not just environmentally polluting but the concentration of young men with fast cash also brought Mexican drug cartels selling crack and local pimps selling First Nation prostitutes. The tobacco smuggling routes into Canada during the 1990s where traceable by both the high-rates of execution-style murders and cancer rates left in their wakes.
The criminal wars of America don't just leave a trail of murder, chaos, rape and human rights violation, they are also environmental disasters. The occasional 'green' initiative by the US military - like the world’s largest solar photovoltaic system at the Neveda air-base where the drone assassination campaign is run or the world's largest wind/diesel hybrid plant located at the Guantánamo Bay torture-gulag - should not obscure that the US military is the single largest polluter and users of fossil fuel on the planet.
I have been collecting information on this subject for the past year. This is a semi-edited compilation of it.
Pentagon Pollution
OIL CONSUMPTION
Militaries with their massive fleets of high-performance, armoured vehicles and air-conditioned desert bases are the hungriest consumers of fossil fuels on the planet. Even outside of war, these vehicles are in constant use for training, mock battles, and international inter-operatabiltiy exercises.
An F-16 at peak thrust uses four gallons of jet fuel per second, one hour at this rate would uses what an average car uses in three years. During battle an Abrams tank uses 252 gallons of fuel per hour, 5 gallons for every mile traveled. Fuel usages for such military vehicles are in ‘gallons per minute’ and ‘barrels per hour’. Except for 80 nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers all US military vehicles run on oil. Even a single deployed US soldier requires 15 gallons a day; an average American uses 1.5 gallons.
Officially the U.S. military uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. This does not include fuel consumed by privatized contractors, leased facilities, and rented vehicles. Nor does it count oil that the military has obtained for free (such as the barrels received from Kuwait as gifts for liberating their kingdom in 1991); nor the fuel required by the massive infrastructure which produces and maintains military equipment; nor the fuel used to launch military satellites.
The Energy Bulletin (Feb. 17, 2007) estimates that the Pentagon's daily oil consumption - for its’ aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and military facilities - as 1 million barrels per day making it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. By comparison, the BP oil rupture was reported to be spewing 25-65 thousand barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico at its worst.
In 2003, as the military prepared for the Iraq invasion, the Army alone estimated it would consume more gasoline in the first three weeks of occupation than the Allied Forces used during the entirety of World War II. The US Navy, Air force and Marines did not provide public estimates. The military fuel requirement of the Iraq occupation was comparable to large, highly industrialized, oil-dependent nation suddenly appeared on Earth between 2003 and 2007.
At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision that the Pentagon had a blanket exemption from all international climate agreements. After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords. The USA emits 25% of world’s greenhouse gases, 35% if Pentagon is included. The U.S. military and its NATO allies comprise the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
SECURING THE OIL
Being so dependent on oil, the military must secure a steady supply which leads to vicious cycle of America’s global military empire being used primarily used to guard Big Oil’s refineries, pipelines, and supertankers. In order to fuel its war machine America props up the most reactionary petro-tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. To curry favour Washington arms the Middle East's repressive regimes with the latest weaponry while it imposes a phalanx of bases with American soldiers, mercenaries, and drones to guard the pumps, refineries, and supply lines of Exxon-Mobil, BP, and Chevron.
TOXIC BASES
The Pentagon is the world’s largest landlord much as the Catholic Pope was in the Middle Ages. The Pentagon is also the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined. So it is unsurprising that US military properties are some of the most toxic environments on the planet.
Pentagon military bases top the Enivomental Protection Agency (EPA) list of the most polluted places. More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. have soils and waters aquifers contaminated with toxic chemicals like the industrial degreaser Trichloroethylene, the rocket propellant Perchlorate and dumped jet fuel.
The U.S. Navy is the largest polluter in California, having created 100 toxic sites during the last 80 years, including spilling over 11,000 gallons of oil into the San Diego Bay in 1988. Fish in that bay contain high levels of mercury and radioactive compounds that are attributable to Navy pollution. The soil near a plant that manufactured depleted uranium rounds in Colonie, New York was found to have 500 times the amount of uranium that one could normally expect to find in soil.
Despite this the Pentagon has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases or to set new stricter pollution standards. (Washington Post, June 30, 2008)
One in ten Americans lives within ten miles of a military site that has been listed as a EPA priority cleanup site. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this poisoning. The Naval Air Station in Fallon, New York has the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. Residents suspect that the contamination of groundwater with radioactive materials and dumped fuel combined with heavy-scale use of radio and electronic emissions are responsible.
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of areas of land and water with radiation. Mountains of radioactive and toxic uranium tailings have been left on Indigenous land in the Southwest with more than 1,000 uranium mines have been abandoned on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.
Current US military bases in found in Japan, Puerto Rico, South Korea, the Philippines, and the former Yugoslavia leaving a global trail of toxic environmental footprints. Abandoned bases in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama and filled with buried barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of corroded rounds of ammunition, leaving them contaminated with millions of kilograms of toxic and potentially radioactive waste. The US military's legacy of chemical defoliants and tens of thousands of unexploded landmines and bombs also poisons these countries' environments. This has referred to as the US military's “pollute and run” policy.
The U.S. war in Vietnam left large areas so contaminated with the Agent Orange herbicide that more than 40 years later, dioxin contamination is 300x to 400x higher than “safe” levels with severe birth defects and high rates of cancer continuing into a 3rd generation of Vietnamese.
BURN PITS & DEPLETED URANIUM
When US bases are used in war their toxicity spikes because of the US military practice of using burn-pits. As this poisons soldiers on the base even the internal pulbications like the U.S. Air Force Times can run an editorial entitled “Stamp Out Burn Pits” (March 1, 2010) stating:
“A growing number of military medical professionals believe burn pits are causing a wave of respiratory and other illnesses among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Found on almost all U.S. bases in the war zones, these open-air trash sites operate 24 hours a day, incinerating trash of all forms — including plastic bottles, paint, petroleum products, unexploded ordinance, hazardous materials, even amputated limbs and medical waste. Their smoke plumes belch dioxin, carbon monoxide and other toxins skyward, producing a toxic fog that hangs over living and working areas.”
The Pentagon admits operating 84 “official” burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, CNN reported on October 15, 2010 that at least 221 burn pits were operated in Afghanistan alone.
The use of depleted uranium as ammunition for its high density has also been implicated in poisoning soldiers and civilians in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Depleted uranium emits radioactivity over a 4.5 billion year half-life
In the 'shock and awe' that began the Iraq invasion of 2003, eight hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched into Baghdad on March 20-21, approximately 1 every 4 minutes. Each 3,000-pound missile delivered 800 pounds of depleted uranium so in two days 320 tons of DU was dumped on Baghdad.
In areas where DU rounds have been used cancer rates have leapt by a factor of 10. Even before the full length of expected latency period in the development of cancer has passed, rates of cancer (especially childhood cancer) and congenital birth defects, as well as infant mortality and abnormal sex ratio in newborns, have all dramatically increased in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004.
This uranium was dug up by military-conscripted First Nations miners in the 1950s from hundreds of military mines in the heart of the Navajo Nation. As the New York Times states, “Navajo miners extracted some 4 million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons." Those same indigenous people, and their grown children, are falling sick from radiation poisoning incurred.
Controversy still surrounds this issue of DU's effects but using radioactive waste as ammunition seems emblematic of US military policy.
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION
During it's 5,000-year history, Iraq served as the breadbasket of the Middle East, the so-called 'fertile crescent', now after two American-led invasion it is an environmental catastrophe.. Iraq's arable and fertile land has become a desert wasteland where the slightest wind whips up a dust storm. The Iraqi Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of the land has severe desertification. A former food exporter, Iraq now imports 80 percent of its food.
A UN environmental report about the first Gulf War points to the damage inflicted by 70-ton tanks like the M-1 Abrams on the ecology of the desert: “Approximately 50% of Kuwait’s land area has had its fragile soil surface destroyed as scores of tanks moved out of that country each day and headed for Iraq.” Once the surface of the earth has broken apart, the wind has an easier job of eroding even more land mass and as organic matter oxidizes, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Add to this soil damage, base pollution and burn pits, the salting of the earth with tens of thousands of pounds of DU, the targeted bombing of cities' infrastructure leading to disease, the igniting of oil wells by Iraq to provide a smoke-screen against bombings.
\"Thoughts on Military Pollution" By Barry Sanders wrote:[from EARTH FIRST! JOURNAL]
When I talk about military pollution I want to write the word with a capital P, because it is so much more lethal than any other kind of pollution we have encountered as environmentalists. While the military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world, that can be a misleading statement since America has a population of 330 million people, a great majority of whom drive cars. And who knows the actual count of factories in this country that continually pump carbons into the atmosphere. But, as I try to point out, the military not only pollutes, it contaminates, it transfigures, it eliminates. And this is why I say it makes no difference how green we get in our homes and offices because the military negates our every effort at cutting greenhouse emissions.
It is not just large corporations that are complicit in this business of making war and polluting the world. I am complicit, too—we all are. Even though I do not wear a uniform, I am an essential part of the military: I pay my taxes, I am allowed to periodically protest some given war, and thus indirectly and against my will I support the war. For me, what I understood after working on this book [The Green Zone] is that the fate of the Earth rests in the hands of the military. That is one of the most frightening and appalling notions anyone can confront. The United States military engages in a War of Terror: it is destroying everything. For me, this is an issue of enormous magnitude, which all of us must confront.
What can we do as environmentalists? As an initial suggestion—and I do not want anyone to think I have the answers—for stopping the olive-drab juggernaut is an overwhelming prospect, but one thing I would like to suggest is that the movement must redefine itself, must expand its range of concerns to include putting an end to war. If you consider yourself green, you must become olive green and include an opposition to the military
Hobb- Admin
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Join date : 2015-03-31
Age : 49
R2N :: Archives :: 2018-9 Archives :: Memes
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