Pirate's Cove

Leftists have long hated the U.S. military, since the 1970’s and the Vietnam era. They’ve tried numerous ways to destroy it, especially things like defunding it. Also, destroying it from the inside by infiltrating it. This next piece rather proves yet again that the whole ‘climate change’ movement is really just a standard Modern Socialist thing that uses “the environment” as cover

We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon

The Pentagon is staring down the barrel of what could become the longest, hottest war in U.S. history. This titanic clash pits the largest military the world has ever seen against an omnipresent opponent that can marshal resources like no enemy it has ever encountered.

That opponent is climate change, and according to a joint investigationby NBC News and InsideClimate News, the extreme heat it brings is already generating military casualties. But soldiers like Sgt. Sylvester Cline are not dying where you might expect, such as scorching, oil-rich targets like Iraq, where Cline served during a lie-tainted war. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Uncle Sam’s long list of military conflicts, this war is also being waged on U.S. soil. Sadly, the Arkansas-based sergeant was just one of “at least 17 troops to die of heat exposure during training exercises at U.S. military bases since 2008.”

In fact, the total number of heat-strokes and cases of heat exhaustion suffered by active-duty service members rose by 60 percent between 2008 and 2018 (from 1,766 to 2,792). Forty percent of these incidents occurred in the Southeastern United States in places like Fort Benning (Georgia), Camp Lejeune (North Carolina) and Fort Polk (Louisiana). Over that same period, the Southeast region has experienced average summer temperatures that were the nation’s hottest on record, and a staggering 61 percent of major Southeast cities show the effects of these worsening heat waves, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment released in 2018.

Um, we’ve been fighting in areas of the world that, get this, tend to be hot and dry. So, of course those heat issues will arise and increase. After a bit of whining we come to

As Brown University’s Costs of War research project recently pointed out, the Defense Department “remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.” British researchers at Durham University and Lancaster University published a corroborating report detailing the profuse use of hydrocarbons to fuel U.S. military adventurism. They astutely pointed out the dilemma of attempting to confront “the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world.” They see the Pentagon “locked into” this situation “for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe.” But that’s not the only catch-22 bedeviling an empire comprised of 800 military bases and installations that cost over a trillion dollars per year to maintain. Far more vexing is the fact that the climate crisis is itself a byproduct of 70 years of U.S. interventionism and empire.

And what do they want to do?

Unfortunately, the longer the U.S. continues to garishly fund the Pentagon and its oil-based protection racket, the harder it will be to deal with the massive ecological and human fallout caused by the hydrocarbon economy. Ultimately, it might be impossible to halt or even mitigate the climate crisis without also ending empire. And if we are not careful, the same forever war mentality that has continually shifted from one enemy to another will find yet another reason to exist — this time as a bulwark against the escalating impacts of a climate crisis it helped to create in the first place.

So, pretty much, they want to defund the Pentagon and U.S. military. Surprise? (Especially since the military tends to lean Conservative)

The U.S. could become a garrison state, pulling back to within its borders like a paranoid survivalist, armed to the teeth with high-tech weapons and ready to gun down anyone and everyone fleeing their storm-ravaged homes and collapsing ecosystems. In many ways, this transition has already begun.