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The U.S. Military is the single largest user of fossil fuels in the U.S.
The Air Force accounts for 65% of that use alone.
Wow. Just Wow. So what are these wars being fought for? Us? Terror? Hardly.
Recently I read something that caught my eye, the U.S. economy has been replaced by a military economy. Very true, but more so, it would be more actuate to state that the U.S. economy has been replace by the weapons manufacturer economy.
We now fight wars to perpetuate the sale of weapons which our government supports to the tune of 50% of our taxes. It funds the U.S. military which in turn keeps ordering new contract for new weapons.
The rise of the Military Industrial Complex as stated by the late President Eisenhower was correct, but I believe, he fell far short of his implied implication. Not putting words in his mouth, I can only assume that he was envisioning a military complex on the level of say a GM or AT&T not an entire economy based upon the manufacture and sale of weapons.
Now I'm not talking about rifles and pistols here. Although they do account for a portion of the sales of arms, but I'm targeting the sale of large munitions. Tanks, helicopters, jets and all the new and latest gewgaws that the weapon corps sell internationally.
So what on earth has this got to do with global warming. Everything.
The military, this being all the worlds various army's run on oil. Period.
There have been several stories about how this branch or that branch is looking into hybrid vehicles for the troops, but in reality that makes up a very small fraction of the force.
Since oil makes the wheels of war turn and we are at, near or past peak oil, the black stuff has become very important to not just the military but the military industrial complex. Without oil all their various products of war can not be produced.
And if they can't be produced, their can't be wars to get that oil. Catch 22.
And as a result of that catch 22 being spewed out by the millions of tons daily is CO2 and other heavy metals all to choke off our atmosphere.
There is the theory in Climate change where when we hit a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere, the plants, the ocean and the soil will no longer be able to absorb anymore and thus an exponential climb of the CO2 begins. Positive Feedback.
We have hit that with the Military Industrial Complex as it is figured into our economy.
Once upon a time, the various corps that provided the material for the military did so on a purely contractual basis. The same could be said for today, but we all know the reality of the powerful lobbyists, the congress people beholden to those corps that provide jobs in their states or districts are the ones responsible for this. Our politics/economy now supports the corps so the corps can support the economy.
At the current state of the economy, if we were to cut the funding to these corps it would have a huge effect upon growth (not that there is much to begin with), paychecks and society in general.
Each and every president has bought into this complex since the end of WWII all to protect us from the Russians during the cold war. When the cold war ended, the military was cut and we began to switch to a peace time force for the first time in close to 50 years. But given the fact that mr. reagen funded the military complex money consuming machine very generously, there was a vacuum that needed to be filled.
And it was filled by the neo-cons who have a vested interest in these military corps to do well. As a result we now find ourselves in a perpetual war, climbing CO2 levels and not a single real program forwarded by the administration nor our congress people to cut levels in green house gases.
Funny how that works huh?
Wars will never end, but the period in which we find ourselves living, the wars that are being fought will wind up killing us, not by steel or lead, but by cooking us to death.
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