The Military Industrial Complex and the Climate Disaster

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC), the powerful conglomerate that includes the Pentagon and the Defense Contractors is a term coined by President Eisenhower in his last speech warning Americans of its potential harm. Eisenhower correctly advised the US public to be aware of the increasing power that this complex had over many decisions in the US government, which could only be curbed with accountability demanded by the people.

His advice was not heeded by politicians and even less by the people, who have been kept in the dark about the reality of this war-mongering complex. Eisenhower’s predictions were too conservative, the power grab has been more extensive than he could have imagined; we are now in a situation in which defense contractors and their satellite corporations have more power than the politicians and the Pentagon itself. Corporation’s main priority is profit maximization and this reduction in priorities implies endless senseless wars with little unbiased intelligence, a concurrent push for more and more unneeded weapons and bases, coupled with a band-aid solution approach to the reality of our environmental and climate change disaster.

At a time when climate change and the health of the environment is perceived as a problem even by the World Economic Forum, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional consumer of energy, spending 93% of all the energy used by the US government. The DOD uses 30,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity (enough to power 2.6 million American homes for a year) and is also the largest single institutional consumer of fossil fuels, about $4.6 billion US gallons annually, or 12,600,000 gallons per day. This high-tech paraphernalia essential for endless war is fossil fuel-hungry, for example, a B-52 bomber spends 3,300 gallons of fuel per hour, an Arleigh-Burke class destroyer can consume 1,000 gallons of fuel in an hour.

The greenhouse emissions of the Pentagon operations around the world are huge, it has been calculated that from 1975 to 2018 the DOD has produced more than 3,685 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. This is the number for the operations of the Pentagon, but it doesn’t include the tons of emissions and toxicity produced by the whole Military Industrial Complex. The mining, transportation of raw materials and parts, manufacturing, maintenance, and disposal of this huge weapons arsenal, the biggest in the world (equivalent to the next 7 countries combined) produces a mind-boggling amount of emissions.

The use and manufacturing of these weapons spread toxic pollution all around the US and the world. In the US there are at least 39,000 contaminated military sites and of the 1,200 Superfund sites (considered the most polluted sites in the U.S.), 900 are related to the US military. The use of depleted uranium weapons is intensely toxic, Iraq was littered with such weapons since the first Iraq war, and the pollution that these radioactive and toxic weapons cause in water and soil has caused a dramatic increase in birth deformities and cancers, negatively impacting the mortality rate in Iraq.

The Military Industrial Complex’s emissions should include also those of the transport and operation of the weapons and war vehicles sold to other countries. Important allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, operate huge US arsenals, but the rest of the world is also obliged to pay tribute to the US by buying its weaponry. Allies in Europe, even the ones that have weapons manufacturers, must buy the wares produced by the MIC and even poor countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, destroyed by the same MIC, are forced to buy expensive weapons, leaving little money for the people. All of this coerced weaponry trade helps to multiply the emissions of the MIC by several factors.

The above makes clear that if we are really going to tackle the climate change problem, the Military Industrial Complex should drastically reduce its energy use, emissions, and pollution with toxic and radioactive substances. There are no band-aid solutions for this, we have to decide between spending energy, emissions, and pollution on a destructive enterprise like war, or use it more wisely for constructive endeavors that will benefit most of the population while the climate crisis unfolds.

As most people expected, the next President has vowed to pay attention to climate change, so President-elect Joe Biden started his new agenda by recently naming John Kerry as climate czar. In an official statement, Kerry recently made clear his not very environmentally friendly priorities. As the founder of the D.C. think-tank American Security Project or ASP, whose board is filled with retired pro-war senators and generals, he declared climate change as an issue of national security, linking his concern for the climate problem with the US military. For Kerry, the supposed solver of our climate woes, the opening of the Arctic waters due to the disappearance of ice is a cause for concern, but only from the national security point of view.

Kerry seems completely unaware that the Arctic is losing ice rapidly, spewing methane into the atmosphere and multiplying dire feedback mechanisms in oceanic and atmospheric currents. Instead, Kerry cares about how to enforce US control over the Arctic’s newly open waters. If the climate czar, exponent of the accepted climate change status quo isn’t even aware of the reality of the Arctic, what can we hope for the future?

Echoing Biden and Kerry’s supposedly more enlightened side of the climate change debate is US Senator Elizabeth Warren who tweeted on May 2019 the following:

“We don’t have to choose between a green military and an effective one. My plan will improve the sustainability of the army, while keeping it effective. Together, we can fight climate change — and win.”

Warren’s 2019 primary campaign pitch included a “plan to green the military that strove, in the name of military readiness, for “net zero carbon emissions”, for all “non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030”. She also advocated the climate-proofing of US bases in case of a sharp sea-level rise, and a new rule for defense contractors (powerful corporations of the MIC) to follow net-zero carbon schemes; failure to do so would punish them with a small fee. Finally, she adds that it would be good to allocate lots of money for research in micro grids and energy storage.

Warren’s proposals, very common among the most aware side of the climate debate, sound like a mad ad proposal for a diet in which you can eat ice cream all day sitting on a couch and still maintain a slim and toned figure.

Warren’s ideas for net-zero emissions for army infrastructure and defense contractors isn’t that original since it is one of the tenets of the 2021 Great Reset’s New Deal for Nature. The idea is based on the assumption that the removal of carbon dioxide through storage in vegetation, soils, and rocks is an essential part of what is needed to solve the climate crisis. This plan fails to acknowledge that we are losing old diverse forests at great speed, which implies a loss of our best carbon sinks. As old forests like the Amazon are destroyed, their carbon absorption diminishes, and the same thing happens with over abused, toxic fertilizer and pesticide-laden soil. Their proposal to plant new trees to compensate won’t work, since these young trees will have very little carbon sink capabilities.

The net-zero idea also implies a very ‘creative’ carbon emissions accounting. A company or institution can easily claim that their emissions are being offset by a third world country that has little industry, or declare their willingness to plant hectares of trees in mono-culture to be cut in a few years for profit, to easily comply with the net-zero emissions guidelines. The Military Industrial Complex has legions of lawyers and accountants whose specialty is creative accounting and favorable legal loopholes to justify more arms buying and unnecessary wars; who could believe that these corporations aren’t going to do the same for carbon emissions? Are these profit-seeking entities, for whom nothing is too low as long as it pumps their gains, suddenly have a drastic change of heart and come clean with carbon emissions and the environment, just because the right President will ask them?

The net-zero emissions scheme also advocates carbon-capturing i.e. removing carbon from the atmosphere to balance the excess emissions we have today. The technology is expensive, requires mining and infrastructure that produce pollution and emissions, and it has only been done at a small scale until now. To rely on such an uncertain fix as a sure solution is wishful thinking. There is also a complementary idea for the expansion of renewable energy, especially the modern type that includes solar and wind. Unfortunately, it is seldom mentioned that its intermittent nature (electrical transmission is not smooth) has made it difficult to use widely and for now, it has only managed to add to the world energy supply; renewable energy is still quite far from replacing fossil fuels which still provide about 84% of the energy we use. An energy-gobbling MIC would arrive at a standstill if it only had renewable energy as its source.

To put all these promises in context, it is useful to understand the magnitude of the scale of operations and the unaccountability of the Pentagon. The total inventory of the Pentagon has never been attempted but in 2012 Leon Panetta finally accepted an audit. To showcase the increasing Pentagon practice of outsourcing most jobs to corporations, the task was assigned to a few accounting firms whose top executives have a cozy revolving door with the Pentagon and the defense contractors. It is not surprising that their audit only included a small percentage of the assets, trying their best to disguise the vastness of the US weapons arsenal, bigger than any other power in the world. This tactic is essential for politicians to easily complain about lack of weapons and constantly demand for more. This excessive and redundant Pentagon equipment, which often becomes obsolete while still unused, implies the further multiplication of emissions and pollution.

The Pentagon claims to be doing something about climate change but their attention seems to be focused on just a few token photo ops and plenty of ecological rhetoric. This tactic was evident on 20 March 2019 when the Pentagon announced with great fanfare a greening of their operations. The star of the ‘green’ show was the new ‘energy efficient’ building of fuel facilities at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina. These include state of the art 2,400 gallons per minute pump house and four new 6000 GPM truck fill stands. This is a perfect example of the cognitive dissonance that pervades the ecological efforts of the Pentagon: energy-efficient infrastructure that helps the Pentagon to fill up their equipment with fossil fuels more efficiently!

The Pentagon also allocated million for energy conservation measures, like the one at Camp Lejeune, a Marine base that boasted new automatic meters, meter data software, lightning systems, and HVAC systems. Continuing their greening effort, the Pentagon created the National Defense Center for Energy and the Environment (NDCEE) but unfortunately, this environmental crusade is manned by the same defense contractors whose only aim is to sell the most weapons to the Pentagon. It is no surprise that their solutions go hand in hand with those proposed by the New Deal for Nature, concentrating on expensive automation to improve energy efficiency, while leaving the real problem untouched. This makes clear that the current environmental consensus is more interested in adding automation, as the Great Reset’s 4th Industrial Revolution advocates, than in dealing with climate change.

Appearing green seems to be the aim of everyone at the moment, the problem is that appearing is not the same thing as being. When Elizabeth Warren expresses her desire to help the environment and assures us it is all feasible, it seems instead that she is conveniently ignoring many variables in the workings of the Pentagon. Corporations want to appear green too, so they will do a few token actions while continuing the massive build-up of weapons for more wars. DC is a town mostly dedicated to the war business. DC lawyers create convoluted legal frameworks to justify eternal war, which translates into huge constant profits for everyone involved: defense contractors, service industries that provide janitorial duties to the Pentagon and the US bases, lawyers, accountants, data and intelligence analysts and of course, politicians. It is certain that a politician will not get very far in DC if he or she doesn’t respond to the demands of the MIC, which is joined by Wall St. and Silicon Valley in the same profit interest.

Amid this profit bonanza, the elephant in the room of climate change and environmental disaster is discreetly ignored. Polite conversation abhors the intrusion of reality that doesn’t suit the happy chatter of profit-obsessed people. Nobody wants to see the end of the Military Industrial Complex’s party; the game is too lucrative to give up, so it will only stop when it has to. The constraints of the physical world in which we live will do that job, but it will be too late: either the MIC will run out of energy or the climate disaster will affect the world in such a way as to make their game meaningless.