Have you ever shoveled out a manure pile? I have. Here’s what it feels like: under the shit, there’s more shit. And under that shit, guess what’s there? If you guessed “more shit” you’re right. Even the dirt under a manure pile becomes so infused that it’s hard to tell where the manure pile stops and the planetary core begins.
That is how I feel about the actions of governments. All of them. I know I’m painting with a broad brush, but – damn – these people are sneaky and disgusting and they’re going to get everyone killed. They’re well on their way to doing so, but guess what? They’re lying about that, too.
Like most of us, I’m familiar with the Kyoto Accords (which everyone ignored, especially the US) and the Paris Accords which tried to put a more solid footing under the basic carbon reductions called for in Kyoto. And, you’re probably aware that US president nihilistic asshat Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Accords in a stunning display of how “representative democracy” authoritarian unilateralism works. Like most of us I initially accepted that the reason the US withdrew from the Paris Accord was Trumpian randomness, but it got me wondering so I grabbed my shovel and dug under a bit of the shit. Now, I kind of wish I hadn’t done that, but I have to admit I am not hugely surprised at what I found under there.
giant fuel bladder baking in the hot sun
I have been curious lately about the US military’s carbon footprint. It’s a thing I bumped up against when I was researching the quantity of fuel the US provided Saudi Arabia so they could launch airstrikes against largely defenseless targets [stderr] – perhaps you may recall:
“about 54 million pounds of fuel off-loaded in support of Saudi operations in Yemen,”
The US military is the single largest organizational consumer of oil in the world. Basically, they burn fuel like it’s going out of style. Technically, I suppose it is going out of style. But you wouldn’t know it if you were watching the US military. Military gear is some of the least efficient stuff around, because it’s optimized for performance regardless of cost. For example, a 747 burns 1 gal/second, in typical cruise. A 747 burns about the same amount of fuel going New York to London as an F-22 burns in an hour flying around at an air show. It’s hard to compare fairly against a military jet, because some military jets have afterburners and those increase fuel consumption 30% to 50%, and the fuel consumption of a military jet is already high. The Air Force is trying to see if it can refit its B-52s with more efficient engines (at monstrous cost) [dr] – the Air Force likes to report its aircraft operating costs in $/hr and they factor fuel into it, so for a B-52 that costs $70,000/hr to fly, how much is it gobbling per second? Lots. It’s not that they’re that much more inefficient, it’s that their purpose is questionable. One can argue that the 747 full of passengers might be valuable economic activity; what is the B-52 doing?
By all means, enjoy your air shows come July 4, America.
Another comparison I was trying to look up was the fuel cost of a “freedom of navigation exercise.” These exercises consist of a couple of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (Aegis missile boats) cruising a loop through the area. Let’s say 2 Burkes going 1000 nautical miles for a total of 2000. A Burke burns a minimum of 2000gal/hr – much more when they are going fast – but a back of the envelope calculation tells me that a cruise like that is around 40 hours. So, that’s a bunch of fuel expended in the cause of tweaking the Chinese and maybe provoking a war keeping the seas free.
It’s so wasteful and it’s so utterly pointless. And, of course, under the shit, there’s more shit: congress unfailingly supports this kind of activity. Sure, there have been a few (widely publicized) congress-people who push back against the war economy, but that’s generally only when a camera is running.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, just wants to make sure that the military has all the money it wants, in case rising seas mess up a base or two, or waterlog some F-22s at a cost of billions: [reuters]
“Let’s save money by budgeting for climate change on the front end, so that the Pentagon doesn’t have to ask for more only after a base is flooded or equipment damaged when natural disasters strike,” Warren said.
Giving the pentagon more money is a fool’s game; they don’t even have an idea where they are spending it all. The only thing they know is that they need more. Warren is a fool if she doesn’t realize that giving the military budget for climate change in advance of a problem just means they’re going to build more bases that will have more problems. What does Warren think they’re going to do, set aside the money in a contingency fund that nobody will touch? Spend the money strategically, or have a great big bonfire of $100 bills? Oh, they’d love that since a bonfire would directly convert cash into CO2.
So, I was thinking that maybe there was a relationship between the carbon footprint of the US military, and the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord. That seems awfully cynical, though, doesn’t it? But it turns out that when the Kyoto and Paris Accords were drawn up, the US exempted its military from counting against its carbon footprint. In other words, the whole accord was turned into a sham, immediately, by the US government as it unilaterally decided that the largest oil-consuming organization on Earth didn’t count. [newrep] It’d be as if I established a calorie-reduced diet so I can lose some weight, and exempted ice cream and pizza from the calculations, because, well, they throw the diet totally off.
It’s not possible to get an idea what that footprint looks like because, probably, the pentagon has no idea and neither does anyone else:
According to Department of Defense figures, the U.S. army emitted more than 70m tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year in 2014. But the figure omits facilities including hundreds of military bases overseas, as well as equipment and vehicles.
I suppose that, in terms of humanity’s output, that’s a drop in the bucket. But it’s something to think about when the US says “China is cheating” – sure, they probably are, but we pretty carefully defined what “cheating” is, in this context. What a great big scam; everybody is cheating. And the US has made it pretty clear that it plans to blow right past its commitments to reduce CO2 – they expect CO2 emissions to keep going up for the next 50 years. Which, coincidentally, translates into “after we’re dead and comfortably buried” or perhaps “after it’s thoroughly too late and we can say ‘hey, look at this doomsday scenario that just dropped into our laps.'” [eia]
Based on preliminary data, total U.S. energy consumption in 2018 will be just 0.4% below the record set in 2007. Relatively high energy consumption is attributable largely to changes in the weather: last year was very warm, and U.S. population-weighted cooling degree days (CDD, an indicator of air-conditioning demand) hit a new record in 2018.
In other words: now that we are starting to bake, we’re going to burn fossil fuels to power our air conditioners. Way to go, humans! We are insignificantly below a record high set a decade ago.
I’m going to go out on a limb, now, and drop something idealistic. This is a proposal I’ve floated elsewhere, and everyone just responds “that’s too idealistic.” I agree with that – it is. But I don’t think it’s any more idealistic than any of the other proposals I’ve heard regarding global climate change, except for the proposals that amount to “trust the government, they’ve got this” or “let the invisible hand of the market sort it out.” After all, when someone promotes something like “cap and trade” they are basically praying the invisible hand of the market will save us. So let’s be idealistic: stop war. If every country on earth stopped spending money on its military for 20 years, we’d have enough money (and interestingly, it’s proportional to who’s the worst CO2 emitters) to re-tool economies for green energy. The conversation around climate change is – far too often – deflected by pseudo-concerns over cost. US politicians constantly pretend to be worried about cost, but they never seem to lack money for the military. I consider all “concerns” about budget that do not address the run-away military budget to be false; it’s just a pose to attempt to deflect discussion.
The US population is relentlessly propagandized by its military, and is saddled with a government that works for corporations, not the people. A large mass of the people have been rendered numb and mute and the politicians pursue their own squabbles and careers, only a tiny handful are worried about the obvious fact that the sky is falling. The rest are full of excuses.
If the nations of the world agreed to stop spending money on their militaries, and to stop spending money on combat operations/stationing troops abroad, etc., it would be a massive disruption of everyone’s economies and that is what we need. Instead of spending that kind of gigantic money on killing eachother, let’s spend it on green infrastructure. Just for 20 years. Business as usual is what is bringing humanity face to face with extinction. A response to the coming disaster that embraces nationalism as part of its solution is going to be ineffective. It’s probably already too late but humanity should meet this challenge with its best foot forward – “united we stand, divided we fall” and all that.
[gallup]
At this point, I feel like it’s just as idealistic and naive to expect humanity’s leadership to not fuck things up, as it is to expect humanity to stop warring on itself for a measly 20 years. You want to talk about naive idealism? Expecting Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Nancy Pelosi, Vladimir Putin, etc to produce anything that’s not an utter clusterfuck – that’s naive idealism, right there.
Another possibility is that the “great filter” that wipes out technological civilizations is their parasite-load of politicians, and we’re at the point where the wheels come off the pram. I think that’s somewhat more likely than that all the clowns running this show are going to cooperate for the duration of the crisis.
Oof, this is going to be a big one. Bear with me.
Last things first, stopping war is not just idealistic, I suspect it’s logically impossible in any system with two or more participants. I don’t know enough about game theory to prove it, but intuition suggests that a situation in which all nations are disarmed must be unstable, since all it would take is a limited mobilisation to provide one nation with a decisive advantage. On the other hand, worldwide alliances should work, since in a system where everyone has a limited and equivalent military capacity, unilateral action will be doomed to fail.
That’s secondary to the main point though, which is about oil. I think it’s impossible to understand the place of oil in international politics without the fact that it underpins and supports the entire US economy. Oil is traded in dollars. Meaning that whenever anyone in the world buys or sells oil, they do so with US dollars. The reasons for this are partly historical and partly economic, and the benefits that the US enjoys as a result make it very hard to change. Not that people haven’t tried. OPEC has on at least one occasion raised the possibility of using the international reserve currency and just last year China made noises indicating a desire to trade in their own currency.
The consequence of the global oil market trading in dollars is that the value of the US dollar is tied very closely to the global demand for oil. It also means that refusing to sell dollars to a particular nation makes it very hard for that nation to buy oil, but that’s not relevant to the point at hand. The point is that demand for oil is a significant part of what floats the dollar in the first place, and any reduction in that demand is going to weaken the currency. Any increase in that demand is going to strengthen the dollar, which leads to the entirely perverse result that burning oil for literally no reason is economically beneficial to the USA.
This, incidentally is almost the entire reason for all global US military intervention since the end of the cold war.
Ian King@#1:
Oof, this is going to be a big one. Bear with me.
General note: text walls are approved here. There have been some substantial comments in the past that have run to pages and pages. That’s actually what this blog is for!
Last things first, stopping war is not just idealistic, I suspect it’s logically impossible in any system with two or more participants. I don’t know enough about game theory to prove it, but intuition suggests that a situation in which all nations are disarmed must be unstable, since all it would take is a limited mobilisation to provide one nation with a decisive advantage.
First and tangentially: I don’t believe game theory can prove anything, it’s a tool for exploring the optimum options in limited well-defined circumstances but it’s not prescriptive. That said, you appear to be saying that casually and I take it that way: game theory might show that in a game where some players are defined as disarmed, a belligerent gets such a huge advantage that it may appear to be the most rational course of action to be belligerent. That’s what I interpret you as saying and, if that’s correct, I agree with you.
That’s the problem with disarmament scenarios in general, I think. Basically, a belligerent can always arise and say “thank you” and wipe everyone out. If that’s the case, then I suspect that any species that invents organized politics will invent war (as a subset of organized politics) and will be doomed to endless warfare. How depressing.
I should clarify one piece about my ‘proposal’ – I am not advising disarmament, merely a stop to spending. I assume that a country with a substantial nuclear ‘deterrent’ would, in fact, use it as a deterrent. The US unfortunately has a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that is not exactly for that purpose: it’s to deter anyone from using nuclear weapons to counter-balance the US’ conventional military superiority. It’s not so much a deterrent as a means for preserving privileged power.
On the other hand, worldwide alliances should work, since in a system where everyone has a limited and equivalent military capacity, unilateral action will be doomed to fail.
It seems to me that that’s the only way to stop war: the rest of the world has to agree to offset any belligerent, any time. It’s probably never going to work because it is the nature of power to attract followers, so a belligerent can create a power-bloc around their belligerence (and call it “NATO”) and be militarily dominant without firing a shot, yet.
That’s secondary to the main point though, which is about oil. I think it’s impossible to understand the place of oil in international politics without the fact that it underpins and supports the entire US economy. […] Any increase in that demand is going to strengthen the dollar, which leads to the entirely perverse result that burning oil for literally no reason is economically beneficial to the USA.
You’re right, I think. And that means we’re toast, because no matter what the world does to try to rein in fossil fuel use, the US will try to block it because the US is the world’s first and last fossil fuel empire.
The US does seem set on the idea that it will pull the building down on itself rather than loosen its grip on the reins of power. That could eventually turn into overt nuclear blackmail, but in the meantime we’ll just wipe humanity out with pollution instead.
If the nations of the world agreed to stop spending money on their militaries…
Every time this has been tried (e.g., postwar demobilizations), economies stagnate or collapse. In the worst cases (say, Iraq after the Bush conquest, Germany after 1918), unemployed ex-military blocs create extremist backlashes to disrupt the new order, making things worse than before.
Any such transition to sustainability needs a thorough and comprehensive plan with consideration for every significant interest group, implemented so as to generate widely distributed net benefits reinforcing its own support. In the present situation, this requires either suborning the plutocracy or eliminating it as a major economic-political factor: not absolutely impossible (see every successful overthrow of aristocracy), but damned difficult.
Such a pity the only (semi-)institutions with the vision and goals to enable such a transition, the Green parties, generally have such a poor track record and inadequate leadership (particularly in the US).
I’m not sure if reducing military spending always makes for a bad economy. Historically, the US greatly reduced the size of its military after the US Civil War and WWI, and there were brief recessions, but then the economy boomed for a decade in both cases. Even after WWII, the US greatly downsized its military for about 5 years until the Korean War, but the postwar economic boom was going by 1947 or 1948. Perhaps something fundamental has changed in the way the US economy works since then, but historically, low military spending often did not mean hard times.
Pierce R. Butler @#3
Cause and effect is much more complicated that what you are implying here. For example, in Germany after WWI there were multiple various complicated problems that resulted in their economic problems. We are talking about a country that has just lost a war, been devastated by bombing and reparations, has to deal with all kinds of shit, and you just claim that “being forced to demilitarize was what caused economic problems in post WWI Germany.” It was a lot more complicated than that. Take another example, Russia in 1990ties. It wasn’t demilitarization as such that caused all their economic problems. There was a plethora of various other shit going on there at the time.
Right now in the world there are numerous countries that are economically prosperous yet spend very little money on their militaries. You cannot claim that military spending in necessary or else a country’s economy will stagnate and collape.
During the Great Depression, increasing military spending helped countries overcome the economic stagnation. But the point from this lesson isn’t that the state must spend on their military in order to overcome economic problems. Instead the lesson is that the state must intervene and create jobs. It doesn’t matter whether a state hires unemployed people to make bombs or whether they are hired to build new hospitals, what matters is that they get a job.
Yeah, I agree. Except I wouldn’t call it difficult, I’d call it impossible. I’m very pessimistic about USA decreasing their military spending. I’m also pessimistic about global warming is general. My bet is that humanity will destroy itself.
Pierce R. Butler@#3:
In the present situation, this requires either suborning the plutocracy or eliminating it as a major economic-political factor
We’re doomed, aren’t we?
springa73@#4:
historically, low military spending often did not mean hard times.
I’m not recommending lowering spending – just spending it elsewhere. The US could go to Lockheed Martin and say “hey why don’t you smarty pants F-35 guys make windmills?” And 50 years later, there’d be $1tn windmills that worked only on sunny days because they were solar powered.
Andreas Avester@#5:
I’m very pessimistic about USA decreasing their military spending. I’m also pessimistic about global warming is general. My bet is that humanity will destroy itself.
I won’t bet against that. I feel a bit bad for the dogs, cats, horses, and cows that allied themselves with the humans to destroy the world – they’re going down with us. And the dogs were just trying to be friendly and keep the wolves from the sheep.
Andreas Avester @ # 5 – you (& springa73 @ # 4) make some good points, but I gotta quibble about one line:
… devastated by bombing …
Not Germany after WWI – no hostile military boot ever left a print on German soil during that unpleasantness, nor did shell or aircraft cross their border (an omission corrected in spades the next time.)
My bet is that humanity will destroy itself.
Can’t argue with that, either – but who did you get to take the bet?
Marcus Ranum @ # 6: We’re doomed, aren’t we?
Humanity as a species may endure, but I wouldn’t want to sell insurance on this “civilization” thing.
The cats will be fine.
The amount of fuel used by the military is one of the reasons why claims that “they” are hiding 100 miles per gallon engine technology or what have you are silly. If there’s one bunch that would love technology like that, it’s militaries. It makes logistics a lot simpler.
My understanding is that the US military is actually far ahead of the rest of the government in recognizing the reality and dangers of climate change. Admittedly, that is an extremely low bar to cross. But with bases all over the world, they’re in a better position than most to figure out the hard dollars and cents costs of all the flooding and hurricanes.
Of course, “recognizing the reality of” is a long way from “making institutional changes to mitigate.” But they are putting money into alternative energy sources, because they need to be prepared for anything, including for politicians to finally come to their senses and start putting sane energy policies in place.
Yes, I have. Sometimes there’s a foot-long venomous centipede in there too. (This may not seem immediately relevant, but if you think about it, you’ll see what I mean.)
Re: withdrawing from the Paris Accords – it doesn’t matter, because they don’t actually commit anybody to anything. They’re purely aspirational – as in, we aspire to keep global warming below 1.5, maybe 2 degrees C, but we’re not going to say anything about how we intend to do that. To borrow your diet analogy, it’s like saying you aspire to lose 50 pounds, but without making any commitment to diet or exercise. They’re completely toothless. Meanwhile, not only are our emissions still growing, but that growth is still accelerating. The best you can say that we’ve achieved so far is that we might be reducing the rate of that acceleration.
brucegee1962@#12:
My understanding is that the US military is actually far ahead of the rest of the government in recognizing the reality and dangers of climate change.
Yes, they are. Folks like Gwynne Dyer have been consulting with them for decades, to help them figure out the best way to handle it. It’s a serious issue for them, because they have a lot of assets they have acquired, which are going to wind up under water. Such as Norfolk Naval Station and Guantanamo Bay. It may be that one positive side-effect of human extinction will be that the US will finally close Gitmo. As I mentioned elsewhere, something like half of the Air Force’s precious supply of F-22 air show fighters was soaked and destroyed in flooding due to climate change. Being aware of the problem does not confer competence.
Re: game theory and impossibility of disarmament.
Marcus, I think you answer this problem youtself here: https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2016/11/06/a-conversation-in-zurich
Defense optimised militaries do not provoke arms races – I wonder what the Swiss army’s carbon footprint is? The U.S. military’s carbon footprint overwhelmingly correlates with force projection.
Um…. I think the F-22 to 747 comparison cannot be right. A 747 going from JFK to LHR burns ~150k pounds of fuel vs. the F-22’s 18k internal. 10x? A combat manouevring F-22 matches a cruising 747 for momentary footprint though.