Let’s face it, the majority who are members of the Cult of Climastrology here in the U.S. vote Democrat. And they have long despised the U.S. military, and have tried many times to reduce, even eliminate, its funding. Since that wasn’t working and didn’t play well with voters, they started infiltrating it to ruin it from the inside. But, hey, what if they could use the “climate crisis” to do the dirty work? The uber-leftist Common Dreams gives it a whirl
Why We Can’t Ignore U.S. Military Emissions
The U.S. military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks, and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.
Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the U.S. military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal. (snip to the end after much whining)
Our study shows that action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine. There are few activities on Earth as environmentally catastrophic as waging war. Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.
It does no good tinkering around the edges of the war machine’s environmental impact. The money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take. There is no shortage of policy priorities that could use a funding bump. Any of these options would be better than fueling one of the largest military forces in history.
Good luck with this notion, chumps. Maybe you can get a few of the Democratic presidential candidates to repeat this, see how that goes.
I’ve often wondered what anti American leftists are referring to when they use the term “the US. Empire”.
Trump 2020 Keep the empire vital!
No infiltration needed. The US Military is, by tradition and design, entirely controlled by civilian authority. They are a part of the executive branch of the government and so they are under the direct control of the chief executive, the president of the USA and his appointees, secretaries of defense, service secretaries and various 300 other appointees. he really can change most military policies on a shim, as we have seen during the Obama, Clinton, and Bush administrations. And if that whim is leftist, there won’t be any judges issuing immediate injunctions against it. So, Clinton’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, W Bush’s policy to reduce Nukes by 30%, Obama’s policies to permit open service for gays and trans. Only matters of significant force structure (number of people in uniform and what they do and where they are stationed) go to Congress. Other than that, the US military is drawn from the population at large and highly reflects that population. So, it is about 20% violently liberal, 20 % nominal liberal, 40% nominally conservative, and 20% who couldn’t care less).
You forgot ‘violently conservative’.
I didn’t forget. Violent and conservative are opposites. It is in the definition of conservatism to be supportive of civil society, governed by rational laws that apply to everyone and to appeal to those laws to redress grievances, not to resort to violence. So a violent conservative cannot exist. But even if they do exist, they don’t exist in the military and if they do exist, their numbers are less than 1% so not worth mentioning. The omission was deliberate. But I understand that to you “conservative” just means “people I don’t like”.
The term “by any means necessary” is not a conservative value.
For the record, I also happen to believe that the US military is about two to three times larger than it needs to be. Bureaucratic inertia keeps it at the size that it is with only minor changes from year to year. Strong military != Large military. Those of us who are in this line of work need to answer “strong enough to do what”, and currently, that answer is “fight a series of known future fantasy threats, that are carefully described and documented”. You can all guess who the current fantasy threat is.