Sustainability and War

I’m not quite sure why this hadn’t occurred to me before, but when the thought struck I was slightly baffled by the fact that not only had it not crossed my mind but it also seemed to be an obvious missed connection by the public at large. I was reading this article in Greentech Media and my jaw dropped at one particular statistic. It costs $418 per gallon to supply oil to the military in Iraq. As soon as I saw that, my mind started thinking through all of the logistics that must be involved in transporting oil to a forward base. Supply lines under heavy guard, with entire units, assets, and corresponding support structure all sucking down their own energy. Tanker trucks in heavy armor accompanied by more guards. Et cetera.

I don’t know the first thing about conducting a war or military supply chain. What’s great about this figure is that I don’t have to. If oil is currently about $1 per gallon then the logistics and support required to get it to the front lines are fully 417 times that amount. And certainly some large portion of that amount goes towards energy, since all of that support infrastructure requires oil to operate. All in all, military operations are a huge hydrocarbon sink.

This made me stop and think about the real lack of critical thought that is given to sustainability by the general public. Two of the “hottest” media topics in the past couple of years have been sustainability and war. Clearly, there is a rather profound relationship between these two topics. The media constantly focuses on small-potatoes sustainability topics such as making sure I turn off the lights when I leave a room. What we should all be discussing, instead, is the impacts that the decisions we make as a society have on sustainability.

Who among us considered the carbon impact of going to war in Iraq when that discussion was happening? Should we have? Is sustainability really only something that matters when we aren’t making any real sacrifices—turning the lights off—or does it define the way that both individuals and societies should think about every decision they make?

The US military used 144 million barrels of oil in 2004. This is roughly on par with the entirity of Greece. 40 million of that was directly related to military operations (as opposed to the maintenance of a standing army). The US DoD is the largest single consumer of oil in the entire world. Do these facts affect your views on war and peace? They affect mine.

Surprisingly or not, there appears to have been very little work done on the sustainability impacts of war.  A rather primitive series of case studies begins to explore the linkage between environment and war.  Another article presents an overview of the topic but basically admits that no detailed work exists to provide hard data.

Here are my brief thoughts on the topic.

• From a pure energy consumption perspective, the impact of having a significant peace-time army is significantly larger than the impact of actual deployment.
• The financial costs of war can be thought of as a sustainability impact, as these all represent opportunity costs.  I wonder what cleantech could do with a trillion dollars?
• Actual environmental devastation from conflict is dramatic and unpredictable.  Remember the oil spills / fires during Desert Storm?

I’ve intentionally left out the social bottom line in this discussion as public discourse does often focus—if narrowly—on this issue.  What I think is particularly under-appreciated are war’s environmental impacts.

Update on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 10:51AM by Tristan Handy

An interesting Rob Day blog entry recently touches on this topic in a slightly more positive way.  We’re not disagreeing with each other, but his perspective is a good new dimension to what I’ve said here.

Comments

[Megs]

There's also the consequent ecosystem & species destruction that often accompanies war, such as Saddam's draining of Iraq's wetlands or the killing of gorillas by rebel soldiers fighting in & around protected forests. A lot of forests also, er, get the axe in conflict.
Those are just off the top of my head; but considering that all of these issues, all environmental actions & in-actions are interconnected, ecosystem destruction is relevant for GHG emissions & well beyond.

[Tristan Handy]

Very much agreed. I wasn't necessarily trying to be exhaustive...I'm sure that I've missed quite a few categories. If anyone else has thoughts to add to the list I'm more than interested in hearing.