Photo by Eddie Kopp on Unsplash
By Michael Pastorkovich
Over the past decade, the Sierra Club has made a strong effort and great strides with its policy of Equity, Inclusion and Justice not only toward the goal of reforming the organization itself but also as an ally in the fight for women's rights, rights for people of color and LGBTQIA rights. At the same time, however, the Club, along with the other large "mainstream" environmental organizations, has been deafeningly silent on issues of war, peace and the increasing militarization of our society.
Perhaps the leadership of the Sierra Club and the other mainstream environmental organizations consider it too controversial to take on what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex" in the post-911 world, but it's failure to speak out on these issues is troubling for the following reasons: (1) The U.S. military runs on oil: jet fuel is a petroleum product; tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, jeeps, etc. all burn petroleum products for fuel. As for the U.S. Navy, out of 490 active craft, all but 83 nuclear vessels (mostly submarines) run on oil. And this is not even taking into consideration the fossil fuels burned to provide fuel for heating, cooking, washing and other maintenance tasks at the more than 100 U.S. bases around the world, and; (2) According to Eco-Watch, "the U.S Department of Defense is both the nation's and the world's largest polluter...[p]roducing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others."
When we take into consideration the principle mission of the U.S. military, things only get worse. If you guessed that mission to be "national security", guess again. According the Peter G. Peterson Foundation: "The United States spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined [emphasis mine]." Two of those "next seven nations" are China and Russia. Pete Peterson was a conservative Republican who served as Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration; the Foundation he established is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. It is hardly necessary to spend nearly 700 billions dollars per year on military bases that span the globe and on ultra-sophisticated hardware in order to combat terrorists who hijack airplanes with box-cutters and who lop off heads with machetes.
The principle mission of the U.S. military is to secure access to "natural resources", primarily oil and natural gas, not so that those climate destroyers can be "kept in the ground" but so that they can be extracted primarily by U.S. and British fossil fuel corporations, sold at a profit and eventually burned by their customers thus contributing to the coming climate catastrophe. The recent sabre rattling over Venezuela has less to do with compassion for hungry Venezuelans than it has to do with the fact that Venezuela is estimated to have twice the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. And, by the way, Iran sits on top of a lot of oil too.
For the environmental movement to ignore these issues is to ignore the million pound elephant in the room. It seems pointless to urge people to recycle while living at ground zero of a world-wide Fossil Fuel Empire spread and enforced by U.S. arms without even raising a whisper of protest.
Recently, presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested that the Pentagon adopt objectives consistent with the Green New Deal and achieve net zero carbon emissions for non-combat bases by the year 2030. With all due respect, Sen. Warren is missing the point. The job of the military is war and there is no way that jet fighters, cruise missiles or aircraft carriers are ever going to run on solar panels and wind turbines. There is no environmentally sustainable way to kill people and blow up things. The war-machine not only kills children and other living things, but it is killing our planet as well.
Peace now.