The Carbon Footprint of War.

• Author: Johansen, Bruce E.
• Position: Oil consumed by the United States Department of Defense during the Iraq War - Essay

The Pentagon's recent announcement that global warming poses a national-security risk should have set off the irony alarms.

The Pentagon has as many as 1,000 bases in other countries, and maintaining these bases (and sending troops to and from them) leaves a gigantic carbon footprint.

The U.S. armed forces consume about 14 million gallons of oil per day, half of it in jet fuel. Humvees average 4 miles per gallon, while an Apache helicopter gets half a mile per gallon.

The Iraq War, which George W. Bush launched in part to protect vital oil supplies, consumed oil at a phenomenal rate.

At the start, in 2003, the United Kingdom Green Party estimated that the United States, Britain, and the minor parties of the "coalition of the willing" were burning the same amount of fuel as the 1.1 billion people of India.

U.S. forces in Iraq during 2007 consumed 40,000 barrels of oil a day, all of which was transported into the war zone from other countries.

The U.S. Air Force uses 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, 10 percent of the U.S. domestic market.

By the end of 2007, according to a report from Oil Change International by Nikki Reisch and Steve Kretzmann, the Iraq War had put at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the air, as much as adding twenty-five million cars to the roads. The Iraq War by itself added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world's nations.

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When we are really serious about carbon footprints, we will know the amount of greenhouse gases generated by each platoon sent to war, each bomb dropped, each tank deployed. However, today we know the carbon footprint of a bag of British potato chips from a Tesco grocery store in England, but war--that elephant in the greenhouse--remains unmeasured.

Consider this one fact: More than 1.4 million liters of bottled water per day are used by our troops, who need them to stay hydrated during Baghdad's 115-degree summer days. How much fuel has been burned to get the water bottles into the war zone?

When the Pentagon trumpets its efforts to save energy--as when it announced in January that it was replacing 4,200 fluorescent lights with light-emitting diode (LED) lights, saving 22 percent of the energy of the old ones--it's a bad joke. Likewise, the solar array posted on the Pentagon roof is a mirage that is aimed at passengers in cars driving on nearby highways.

The business of the Pentagon is still war, and the making...