fossil fuels and war
Submitted by antarchi on June 13, 2010 - 21:55
The Pentagon devours about 330,000 barrels of oil per day (a barrel has 42 gallons), more than the vast majority of the world's countries. If the U.S. military were a nation-state, it would be ranked number 37 in terms of oil consumption - ahead of the likes of the Philippines, Portugal, and Nigeria - according to the CIA Factbook.
The amount of oil consumed per soldier per day in wartime has increased by 175 percent since Vietnam, given the Pentagon's increasing use and number of motorized vehicles. A 2010 study by Deloitte, the financial services company, reports that the Pentagon uses 22 gallons of oil per day per soldier deployed in its wars, a figure that is expected to grow 1.5 percent annually though 2017.
The worst offender is the Air Force, which consumes 2.5 billion gallons of aviation fuel a year, and accounts for more than half of the Pentagon's energy use. Under normal flight conditions, a F-16 fighter jet burns up to 2,000 gallons of fuel per flight hour. The resulting detrimental impact on the Earth's climate system is much greater per mile traveled than motorized ground transport due to the height at which planes fly combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit.
