Pentagon Carbon Pollution Is Killing Life On Our Planet #PentagonClimateCrime

Thanks to Anthony Freda for this image.  anthonyfreda.com

The carbon footprint for the barrels of oil 

the Pentagon burned in 2013:

 38,700,000 metric tons of CO2 *

Sharon Burke reported in the May/June 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Last year, the U.S. Department of Defense was the single largest consumer of fuel in the United States, using about 90 million barrels of oil...The fuel requirements [sic] of the U.S. armed forces accounted for...more than 80 percent of the federal government's total fuel consumption.

She went on to count the ways that the Pentagon sees this as a problem: they might run out, dependence on fossil fuel creates a vast web of supply lines vulnerable to attack. CO2 pollution? Not even on the radar. 

Climate change? Yes, that is a factor the Pentagon considers as the military may find itself flooded out of coastal bases, or quelling refugee populations whose traditional homelands have become what environmental author Naomi Klein calls "sacrifice zones."

But, as Klein observed in her book This Changes Everything, "we're all in a sacrifice zone now." She's mostly talking about toxicity and water pollution from fracking and mining, but also about the planetary aspect of extreme weather, melting ice and rising sea levels.

Maybe the fact that the whole planet is a sacrifice zone  is a good thing. Maybe as a result the affluent will wake up to the fact that entertaining ourselves while ignoring global warming is a dead end that our children and grandchildren will live long enough to crash into.

"Last Run" by Kenny Cole  kennycole.com/

Life on Earth can't afford the Pentagon's carbon footprint. And ignoring their CO2 spew won't make it go away.

* 0.43 metric tons of CO2 per barrel of crude oil x 90,000,000 barrels

U.S. Department of Environmental Protection carbon calculator