By Lancaster University, Science Daily, June 20, 2019
Row after row of U.S. F-16 Fighting Falcons fills the airstrip in a show of force at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea
The US military's carbon footprint is enormous and must be confronted in order to have a substantial effect on battling global warming, experts argue.
Research by social scientists from Durham University and Lancaster University shows the US military is one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.
The majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting routinely focuses on civilian energy use and fuel consumption, not on the US military. This new study, published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, calculates part of the US military's impact on climate change through critical analysis of its global logistical supply chains.
The research provides an independent public assessment of the US military's greenhouse gas emissions. It reports that if the US military were a nation state, it would be the 47th largest emitter of GHG in the world, if only taking into account the emission from fuel usage.
Report co-author Dr Patrick Bigger, of Lancaster University Environment Centre, said: "The US Military has long understood it is not immune from the potential consequences of climate change -- recognising it as a threat multiplier that can exacerbate other threats -- nor has it ignored its own contribution to the problem.
"Yet its climate policy is fundamentally contradictory -- confronting the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, a situation it is locked into for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe."
Despite the recent increase in attention, the US military's dependence on fossil fuels is unlikely to change. The US is continuing to pursue open-ended operations around the globe, with the life-cycles of existing military aircraft and warships locking them into hydrocarbons for years to come.
The research comes at a time when the US military is preparing for climate change through both its global supply networks and its security infrastructure. This study brings transparency to one of the world's largest institutional consumers of hydrocarbons at a time when the issue is a hot-button topic on the US Presidential campaign trail. Leading Democratic candidates, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, are asking critical questions of the role of the US military in climate change and examining its plans for the future.
Co-author Dr Benjamin Neimark, Associate Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster, said: "This research provides ample evidence to support recent calls by activist networks to include the US military in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal and other international climate treaties."
Co-author Dr Oliver Belcher, of Durham University's Department of Geography, said: "Our research demonstrates that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, you must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon-based fuels possible.
"How do we account for the most far-reaching, sophisticated supply chains, and the largest climate polluter in history? While incremental changes can amount to radical effects in the long-run, there is no shortage of evidence that the climate is at a tipping point and more is needed."
The researchers' examination of the US military 'carbon boot-print' started with the US Defense Logistics Agency -- Energy (DLA-E), a powerful yet virtually unresearched sub-agency within the larger Defense Logistics Agency. It is the primary purchase-point for hydrocarbon-based fuels for the US Military, and a powerful actor in the global oil market, with the fuels it delivers powering everything from routine base operations in the USA to forward operating bases in Afghanistan.
"An important way to cool off the furnace of the climate emergency is to turn off vast sections of the military machine," added Dr Neimark. "This will have not only the immediate effect of reducing emissions in the here-and-now, but create a disincentive in developing new hydrocarbon infrastructure integral to US military operations."
Other key findings of the report include:
In 2017 alone, the US military purchased about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kt- CO2e by burning those fuels. In 2017 alone, the Air Force purchased $4.9 billion worth of fuel and the Navy $2.8 billion, followed by the Army at $947 million and Marines at $36 million.
If the US military were a country, it would nestle between Peru and Portugal in the global league table of fuel purchasing, when comparing 2014 World Bank country liquid fuel consumption with 2015 US military liquid fuel consumption.
For 2014, the scale of emissions is roughly equivalent to total -- not just fuel -- emissions from Romania. According to the DLA-E data obtained by the researchers, which includes GHG emissions from direct or stationary sources, indirect or mobile sources and electricity use, and other indirect, including upstream and downstream emissions.
The Air Force is by far the largest emitter of GHG at more than 13,000 kt CO2e, almost double that of the US Navy's 7,800 kt CO2e. In addition to using the most polluting types of fuel, the Air Force and Navy are also the largest purchasers of fuel.
Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, Cara Kennelly. Hidden carbon costs of the 'everywhere war': Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot-print of the US military. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019; DOI: 10.1111/tran.12319
As the ugly war in Ukraine drags on, with more lives lost and atrocities (apparently) committed, energy and food prices hit yet more highs. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes a monthly global price index. The FAO Food Price Index reached yet another record high of 159.3 points in March, up 12.6% from February.
FAO Food price index
Oil and gas prices are also near all-time high levels. In Europe, gas prices hit a record €335 per megawatt hours, and at that level, it is now cheaper for some power stations to burn coal rather than gas even when the cost of carbon permits is taken into consideration. Europe wants to follow NATO’s bidding and cut back on Russian energy imports. The irony is that some countries, like Italy, say that will need to burn more coal, in order to burn less Russian gas. The International Energy Agency (IEA) posed the dilemma in relation to global warming and energy needs, given the Ukraine war and the sanctions against Russia. “The faster EU policy makers seek to move away from Russian gas supplies, the greater the potential implication, in terms of economic costs and near-term emissions,”the IEA said, in a report.
Can the circle be squared: ie getting more energy supply to reduce prices, while still trying to reduce fossil fuel production to lower greenhouse gas emissions? “We are determined to limit [Vladimir] Putin’s capacity to finance his atrocious war,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, wrote on Twitter. And then went on to say: “The EU must get rid of its dependency on fossil fuels”. At first sight, these two aims might be compatible. Cutting back on fossil fuel energy from Russia will reduce energy use and lower carbon emissions, no? After all, clean energy, says Christian Lindner, finance minister of Germany, should be considered the “energy of freedom”. So the German government plans to cut its dependence on Russian energy imports by accelerating renewables and reaching 100% ‘clean power’ by 2035. But in the same breath German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accepted that, in the short term, it has little choice but to continue buying gas and oil from Russia!
COP26 in Glasgow contained an agreementto draw down fossil fuel production, even though there was a fierce argument that broke out over whether coal should be “phased down” or “phased out”. COP26 president Alok Sharma. “Countries are turning their back on coal,” he said. “The end of coal is in sight.” And yet, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine , far from declining, coal use globally surged to record levels this last winter, causing emissions to rise, while clean energy installations fell below the levels needed to reach climate targets. In the US, coal-fired power generation was higher in 2021 under President Joe Biden than it was in 2019 under then president Donald Trump, who had positioned himself as the would-be saviour of America’s coal industry. In Europe, coal power rose 18 per cent in 2021, its first increase in almost a decade. Economist Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford university, says the shift away from fossil fuels has rarely looked more complicated. “The energy transition was already in trouble — 80 per cent of the world’s energy is still from fossil fuels,” he said. “I expect that in the short term, the US will increase oil and gas output and EU coal consumption could increase”.
This conflict of aims by ‘the West’ comes at a time when global warming and climate change are reaching a ‘now or never’ tipping point, where the Paris target to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C cannot be met. In presenting the latest IPCC report on climate change (which supposedly outlines ‘solutions’ to mitigate global warming and meet targets), UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commented: “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership (by governments) is criminal.” By this he meant that the 198 countries which had gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 Climate Change Conference last November were failing to hit any of their (already inadequate) targets for emission reductions. So global temperatures look set to barrel past 1.5ºC degrees limit above 1850 industrial levels. Instead, the world faces a 2.7C temperature rise on current climate plans, the UN warned. Current pledges would reduce carbon emissions by only about 7.5% by 2030, far less than the 45% cut that scientists say is needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.
And it’s not just reducing current emissions that is necessary, but also cutting back on the already accrued levels of carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a stock problem because many gases are long-lived. Nitrous oxide can stay in the atmosphere for 121 years, methane for 12 years. Carbon dioxide’s lifetime cannot be represented with a single value because the gas is not destroyed over time, but cycles through the ocean–atmosphere–land system. Some carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years and the melting of the glaciers could release into the atmosphere previously trapped carbon.
Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC, bluntly explained that: “human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability.” While “some development and adaptation efforts have reduced vulnerability,” he continued, “the rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt.” Co-chair of the IPCC working group, Hans-Otto Portner, spelt it out: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”
Lee made it clear what he thought should be done immediately. “The time to stop the exploration of fossil fuels, which are destroying our planet, is now. Half measures are no longer an option,” But just stopping fossil fuel exploration is precisely that – a half measure. That’s because to meet the Paris agreement, the world would have to eliminate 53.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year for the next 30 years.
The problem is that it is ‘the West’: the mature capitalist economies, that have built up the stock of dangerous carbon and other gases in the atmosphere over the last 100 years which are doing the least to solve the climate crisis. About one-third of the current stock of greenhouse gases has been created by Europe and one-quarter by the US. Yes, China and India are the first- and third-largest emitters today. But measured in terms of emissions per head of population, they are around 40th and 140th, and measured in terms of their stock per capita, they are one-tenth of the level of Europe. And ironically, the main contributors to carbon emissions stock benefit from global warming as these mature capitalist (imperialist) economies are mainly in cold climates.
The countries of the ‘global North’ (Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan) are responsible for 92% of total emissions that are causing climate breakdown. Meanwhile, the Global South – the entire continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America – are responsible for only 8% of ‘excess emissions’. And the majority of these countries are still well within their fair shares of the emissions boundary, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria. To make matters worse, the impacts of climate breakdown fall disproportionately on the countries of the global South, which suffer the vast majority of climate change-induced damages and mortality within their borders.
ŵLancet report
But a recent research paper in the journal Nature found that G20 countries spent$14tn on economic stimulus measures during 2020 and 2021 — but only 6 per cent of this was allocated to areas that would cut emissions. Investment bank Morgan Stanley reckons to achieve sufficient emissions reduction would cost about $50trn. About $20 trillion of cumulative investments will be required to switch out of fossil fuels. Solar, wind,and hydro will require $14 trillion of investment to deliver 80% of global power by 2050 and electric vehicle take-up will require $11 trillion to build the factories and infrastructure and develop battery technology. Biofuels, like ethanol, could be important for future global transportation alongside hydrogen and could eventually spread to aircraft, but to develop this would require a further $2.7trillion of investment. Carbon capture and storage could play a critical part in the energy transition but a further $2.5 trillion is needed for development. Compare the $50 trillion price tag to the barely $100 billion that it has taken six years for countries to scrounge together.
Yes, greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced in some countries and there are technical solutions available. Alternative renewable energy costs have come down 85% over the last ten years. But coal production must be cut by 76% by 2030. And oil/gas infrastructure projects must be stopped. The current flow of finance is dramatically insufficient to boost renewables and manage fossil fuel reduction. Funding for all this change is miniscule compared to the task.
And a switch to ‘clean energy’ won’t be enough, especially as mining and refining alternative fuels and systems also require more fossil fuel energy. All the batteries, solar panels and windmills in the world won’t lower fossil fuel demand in the near term. Internal combustion vehicles – commercial and passenger – use plenty of steel, but electric vehicles use a wider variety of more expensive metals. For example, the average internal combustion passenger vehicle uses less than 50 pounds of copper, whereas a Tesla uses about 180 pounds of copper wound up in its electric motors. Additionally, the batteries essential to electric vehicles rely on materials like lithium and nickel, which require intense electric and chemical outlays to process. All this means more fossil fuel production to mine more metals.
I have discussed before whymarket solutions like carbon pricing and carbon taxeswill not deliver the required reductions in emissions. Market solutions will not work because it is just not profitable for capital to invest in climate change mitigation: “Private investment in productive capital and infrastructure faces high upfront costs and significant uncertainties that cannot always be priced. Investments for the transition to a low-carbon economy are additionally exposed to important political risks, illiquidity and uncertain returns, depending on policy approaches to mitigation as well as unpredictable technological advances.” (IMF). To save the planet and all species who live on it cannot be achieved through market pricing mechanisms or even more clever technology. Remember clever science gave us vaccines and medicines to save lives in the COVID pandemic, but it was capitalism and pro-capitalist governments that still allowed the pandemic to happen and were unable to stop around 20m ‘excess deaths’ globally.
To stop global warming, we don’t need just clever new technology, we need to phase out old fossil fuel technology. And we need a global plan to steer investments into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. Such a plan could also equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries. But such a plan requires public ownership and control of fossil fuel companies and other key energy and food sectors. Without that, there can be no plan.
As the war in Ukraine rages on, we should be reminded that the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are the military. The US military is world’s single largest consumer of oil, and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters. The Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions annually total over 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If it were a nation state, the US military would be the 47th largest emitter in the world., with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark.
And the US military is expanding all the time to protect US interests in oil and fossil fuel resources around the world. The Cost of Wars Project found the total emissions from war-related activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria to be estimated at more than 400 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide alone. Thus global warming and fossil fuel exploration, production and refining are inextricably linked by military spending. Wars and increased spending on arms are not just killing people and destroying lives and homes, but also adding to the climate disaster that is engulfing humanity globally. World peace would not only save lives and livelihoods, but also contribute to saving the planet and nature.
Two films have come my way recently that deal in their own way with the systematic brutality of modern armies. “Burma Soldier”, an HBO Documentary that airs on Wednesday, May 18, tells the story of Myo Myint who joined the Burmese army in 1979 at the age of 16 and trained as specialist clearing landmines. An attack by Burmese insurgents severely injured Myint, leaving him without a leg, an arm and most of the fingers on the hand of the remaining arm. What he lost physically was offset by a political and spiritual transformation that turned him into a pro-democracy activist. Not only is “Burma Soldier” a stirring portrait of one man’s struggle against physical and political adversity, it is an excellent introduction to the country’s history. Now playing at the Film Forum in New York, “City of Life and Death” is a fictional account of the so-called Rape of Nanking, the Japanese army’s assault on China’s capital city in 1937 based on Iris Chang’s 1997 best-seller. I can recommend it but with major qualifications.
Even before his calamitous injuries, Myint began to question the cruel and anti-democratic role of the military. To start with, the dominant Burma nationality sought to impose itself on other ethnic groups in the same fashion as the Turks over the Kurds, or the Chinese over the Tibetans. The military that had seized power in 1962 sought to forcibly assimilate the “lesser” nationalities into its own warped vision of Burmese identity in accordance with the arrogant “modernizing” vision of both British colonialism and the “socialist” powers that forgot that there is no socialism without democracy.
He saw countless acts of brutality when on duty. Women, especially from the non-Burma nationalities, were forced to work as porters and even to walk in front of the soldiers in mine-infested terrain. Insurgent captives were routinely tortured. Myint recounts one incident in which a knife was plunged through the cheeks of a man during the course of an interrogation.
As you watch “Burma Soldier”, you cannot help but be reminded of the unfolding drama in the Middle East as one self-described “socialist” or “radical” government seeks to impose itself on a restive population. It is useful to remember that the brutal and corrupt Burmese military that has as dominant a role in the national economy as is the case in China or once was the case in Turkey.
General Ne Win, who came to a power in a 1962 coup, proposed a “Burmese Way to Socialism” that blended Marxist verbiage with outright nonsense. For example, the film describes his 1988 fiscal measures, taken on the advice of an astrologer. Win devalued the currency according to a formula: any monies divisible by the number nine were now invalid. So devastating were consequences for the poor and the working class that the seeds for today’s pro-democracy movement were implanted. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the main reason the Burmese people want the right to elect their own leaders freely is because that is a way to address economic exploitation, even that which occurs in the name of socialism. As a tarnished symbol of a degraded system, General Ne Win had much in common with Libya’s Qaddafi. Win claimed that his socialist system would mix Marxism and Buddhism, while Qaddafi’s recipe included Islam instead of Buddhism. In either case, you ended up with a despotic system that sparked a wholesale revolt.
After leaving the army, Myint embarked on an intellectual journey that led him to read a wide variety of philosophical and political books. He came to the conclusion that the system had to be transformed. He became an activist and took part in demonstrations following the 1988 economic restructuring. He also started a secret library of banned books. When he was arrested at a rally, he told the judge at his trial that “I don’t believe in the military regime”. That act of defiance led to a 15 year prison sentence.
The oppressive system in Burma has led to remarkable acts of courage from individuals such as Aung San Suu Kyi who was under house arrest for about the same number of years Myint was in prison. In the 1990 general election, her party won 59% of the votes and 81% (392 of 485) of the seats in Parliament. The army decided that the people’s will meant nothing and have ruled by terror for more than the past 20 years. One can only hope that the people of Burma will finally prevail since history and the unshakeable will of people like Myo Myint are on their side.
“City of Life and Death” is an unrelenting journey through the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937 that some scholars believe resulted in the deaths of as many as 300,000 civilians. Considering that these deaths occurred in the span of weeks rather than years, it has led some to consider it as one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century in terms of the time-frame.
Hewing closely to the findings of Iris Chang, Chinese director Lu Chuan tells a tale of unremitting cruelty that amounts to a holocaust for his own people. Indeed, this story included its own Oskar Schindler, one John Rabe, a German businessman (despite his Anglo-sounding name) that ran Siemen’s branch operation in Nanking, who confronted the Japanese army over its abuses and sought to protect civilians in a Safety Zone that was often disregarded by the occupiers. In one scene, they come into the Safety Zone in order to dragoon 100 Chinese women into working as sex slaves for their troops.
Rabe (John Paisley) has a Chinese male secretary named Tang (played by Fan Wei, a Chinese comedian in a decidedly non-comic role) who like his boss appeals to the dubiously better judgment of the Japanese. In a departure from conventional holocaust type narratives, John Rabe is a member of the Nazi party who uses his ties to Hitler to sway the Japanese military brass. In one of the unfortunately all-too-glaring missteps of this well-intentioned film, there is no attempt to put his humanitarian impulses into any kind of context. We can only surmise that Rabe had an emotional attachment to the Chinese people that stemmed from having living in Nanking since 1909.
As might be expected, Tang is a passive figure who follows Japanese orders in more or less the same way that the Judenrat cooperated with Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, at least until the full horror of Japanese occupation is revealed. In one of the film’s more wrenching scenes, the soldiers hurl his 11 year old daughter through the second story window of an apartment building killing her instantly. Her offense was to try to interfere with a Japanese detachment that was rounding up Chinese women for a “comfort station”, including her mother.
Given the unrelenting procession of horrors that are depicted in this 133 minute film (Chinese captives burned alive, etc.), one might ask what might motivate an audience to remain in its seats until the bitter end, about which there is no doubt from the very beginning.
The NY Times review puts its finger on one of the film’s strengths:
“City of Life and Death” isn’t cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must. In one awful, surreal interlude, severed male heads swing from rope like ornaments, while in another, Japanese soldiers — having buried some Chinese men alive — stamp down the earth as if planting a crop.
Although I recommend this film with some reservations, I have to wonder about the strange world we are living in when the “immodest balm of art” suffices. Somehow, the visual power of Lu’s film is expected as a pay off when all else fails in terms of our conventional expectations of drama. Shot in black-and-, it certainly grips your attention with its flair for the macabre.
But despite my admittedly close attention to the gruesome action, I found myself troubled throughout by the film’s lack of context. There is nothing at all to explain why the Japanese occupation was so barbaric. In many ways, the film reminded me of the 1997 “Welcome to Sarajevo” that depicted the Serbs in pretty much the same terms, as demonic forces that killed for the love of killing.
Iris Chang’s book set the tone for the film by adopting the same stance toward the Japanese whose culture apparently set them on the course of a Nanking holocaust in the same way that German culture prepared the extermination of the Jews. Some critics of her books take exception to that view, however. In a 1998 review that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, David M. Kennedy wrote:
Elsewhere Chang serves notice that “this book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character,” but then immediately plunges into an exploration of the thousand-year-deep roots of the “Japanese identity”–a bloody business, in her estimation, replete with martial competitions, samurai ethics, and the fearsome warriors’ code of bushido, the clear inference being, despite the disclaimer, that “the path to Nanking” runs through the very marrow of Japanese culture.
In my view, wartime savagery is not the reflection of any national culture but instead the result of indoctrination that young men and women receive when they are drafted or when they enlist during the kind of fervor that arose after 9/11. Military training consists mainly of getting normal people to get used to the idea of killing, a most unnatural form of behavior no matter what a sociobiologist might tell you. It is not in our culture or in our genes. It is rather in the propaganda system of the hegemonic powers and their drill instructors that are carefully selected for their ability to transform ordinary people into killers. For insights into this, I recommend Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”.
While it has long been known the US military is one of the biggest polluters in the world, the egregious and intentional nature of its actions is less well known.
Canadian researchers recently revealedhow an extremely toxic chemical used in US military explosives that the Pentagon has been downplaying for decades has been seeping into surrounding communities for years.
Meanwhile,as Truthout has reportedextensively, US Naval warplanes are producing deadly levels of jet noise around airstrips in the Pacific Northwest, despite the widespread public outcry.
For years, the Department of Defense has been using the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law designed to protect people from harmful environmental actions by federal agencies, to allow military entities to engage in operations harmful to millions of civilians.
"NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions," theEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA) websitestates about the law.
But experts are calling out the Department of Defense for repeatedly violating the spirit, intent, and often even the letter of this federal law.
Whether by dumping toxic waste in areas where people are exposed to it, or by conducting training exercises that subject people to harmful levels of noise, instead of protecting civilians, the military is willfully harming them.
The Military's Playbook
Using the NEPA process, the US military is required to evaluate the environmental and related social and economic effects of their proposed actions. The military is also required by NEPA to provide opportunities for public review and comment on those evaluations.
But critics say the military has stacked the deck in its own favor in order to get what it wants, oftentimes even doing so illegally.
Karen Sullivan, a retired endangered species biologist, co-founded theWest Coast Action Alliance, which acts as a watchdog of naval activities in the Pacific Northwest.
Sullivan has compiled a document that she believes to be akin to a DOD "NEPA Playbook," which she shared with Truthout.
The pattern Sullivan sees the DOD use to insure its operations or trainings are never held up or denied by NEPA begins with the military always finding, in its environmental assessments, that its activities will have "no significant impact" on the environment or civilians.
Sullivan explained how in October 2017, she asked the Navy to provide examples within the last 10 years in the Pacific Northwest region where, during an environmental assessment (EA) process for any of their requests, impacts were determined to be significant. In such a case, the Navy would need to begin an environmental impact statement (EIS) process. Sullivan told Truthout that a Navy spokesperson told her, "There have been no regional Navy projects over the past 10 years that stopped an EA process, and elevated it to become an EIS process."
How is this possible? Sullivan pointed out that if impacts from the military's activities are likely to be significant for a particular project, the military segments that project into multiple pieces, so that several EAs (rather than one comprehensive EIS) can be prepared. This strategy allows it to portray the impacts described in each EA as below the threshold of significance. This is illegal. It is called "impermissible segmentation" under NEPA (40 CFR 1500-1508), which prohibits the breaking up of a larger project into smaller components that separately might have negligible impacts, but would, if considered together, likely be significant. It's illegal for an agency to do this.
Sullivan pointed out that the Navy has "piecemealed" its aircraft testing and training activities in the Pacific Northwest, thereby hiding broader cumulative impacts of all of their war planes. "As a result of this piecemealing and not examining cumulative impacts, the Navy stated in its latest Growler [war plane] EIS that it could not promise that regional air quality would not fall below [federal] standards," Sullivan said. "This would render our [Puget Sound] air quality closer to that of big cities like Chicago or New York."
Another part of the "playbook" includes splitting larger EIS projects into "phases" and rolling them out in rapid succession. This tactic makes it nearly impossible for people to keep up with what the Navy is doing and functions as sort of an informational "shock and awe" tactic on the public, which is often left with thousands of pages of documentation to read and comprehend in an extremely short amount of time. Another entails the military citing an absence of controversy or public opposition to their plans as a justification to stay beneath "threshold triggers" for an EIS. Sullivan pointed out that this ignores the fact that actual environmental impacts from the Navy's actions are what triggers the necessity of an EIS to be carried out.
Another play the military uses: It makes its public notifications of the meetings about proposed activities as cryptic as possible. It even removes the names and email addresses of vocal opponents from their mailing lists, according to Sullivan, who said she has been removed from Navy email lists for notifications at least three times.
The military also makes it difficult for the public to participate in its meetings and speak on the record, according to Sullivan. This is accomplished by limiting online public comments on complex issues to a low word count, and abbreviating and/or limiting some public comment periods. This is illegal according to NEPA policy.
In fact, the military often makes decisions on plans and commits funding for them before even initiating the public process, according to Sullivan. This, too, is against the law: Obviously, the NEPA process must be followed, in a correct order; hence, carrying forward on making plans and commitments of funding before the public process has been completed is yet another violation of the NEPA process..
Moreover, Sullivan said the military never proposes or considers any "preferred alternatives" to its plans that would actually reduce environmental or human impacts.
Sullivan explains that in evaluating potential impacts, the military also selectively ignores recent peer-reviewed scientific literature. "They cherry-pick statements from scientific papers and use them ambiguously and out of context, even if those papers concluded the opposite," Sullivan, who haswritten at length about this tactic and its illegality, said.
The Military's "Guidelines for Success" for Training on Public Lands
Carol Miller is a researcher and member of New Mexico'sPeaceful Skies Coalition, a coalition of groups working to hold unbridled and unchecked military expansionism in check in the state.
Miller pointed out to Truthout that, in response to the creation of Earth Day in 1970, the US Army War College hired a retired US Forest Service employee to create a guide for enabling more military operations on public lands.
"That darn Earth Day movement had created all the pesky environmentalists who felt they had an obligation to protect the land," Miller said. "This document ["Military Training on Public Lands: Guidelines for Success"] is still the Bible of military land grabs for the public lands."
The document contains a whole section on NEPA. Altogether, "Military Training on Public Lands: Guidelines for Success" is essentially a step-by-step guide instructing the military on how to get what it wants.
"Because many Americans have an increased awareness of environmental, social, and economic issues related to natural resource management, the military often faces adverse public reaction to conducting training on these lands,"reads page one of the report, which was authored by former US Forest Service employee Michael King. "My purpose here is to discuss the issue of military training on public lands and to identify guidelines that military decision makers can apply to meet their training objectives within the strictures that Americans expect of proper public land management."
Page fourof the document discusses an "Interdepartmental Agreement" between the DOD and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that requires the USDA to include making allowances for military "needs."
"This Agreement updates earlier policy statements and identifies the procedure for planning, scheduling, and conducting military activities on National Forest Lands," the document readson pages 4-5. "It also affirms the long-standing policy that national forests can provide a variety of settings to conduct military training exercises." In asectiontitled "Trends in Society," the document discuss how the US "underwent a transformation toward an increased awareness and appreciation for natural resource lands and improved environmental laws. Legislation in Congress produced the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Wilderness Act, the National Trails Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act."
"In 1970, America experienced its first 'Earth Day' -- April 22, 1970," itreads. "The words 'ecology,' 'environmentalist,' 'environmental analysis' and 'special interest group' became the buzz words of the natural resource community."
Then onpage 7, the report discusses how "segments of the population feel that the bases and training centers scattered around the United States are the proper places to train" because "people are sensitized through television news, movies, and personal experience to equate training with destruction."
"The idea of training on natural resource lands also violates a widespread belief that military training is not an appropriate use of these lands," thereport adds. "Wildlands are essentially 'zoned' for recreational enjoyment, wildlife, grazing, timber, and minerals management. Many people think military use violates the 'psychological experience' one comes to expect from public lands."
Outlining a long-time part of the military's strategy, page 11 states, "The congressional delegations and their staffs should be consulted and informed of the proposals to enter into agreements with public land or large private landowners." This is because, as the report goes on to state, "Often the first place a concerned citizen or group turns to is their senators or representatives in Washington, D.C."
One example of the effectiveness of this tactic comes in the form of theWashington Military Alliance(WMA), which works directly with Washington State's Department of Commerce to assist in making all of the state "more compatible" with military activities, according to the WMA website. The WMA was convened and supported by Washington's "green governor" Jay Inslee, and uses taxpayer money to fund studies supportive of bringing more military jobs to the state.
It is a perfect example of how a state bends over backwards to not onlygive the military everything it wants, but even more, to bring military money into the state economy, regardless of negative impacts on the environment or civilian populations.
Ignoring the Impacts
Glen Milner is a researcher and member of the activist group Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which has been involved in two NEPA lawsuits against the Navy.
Milner told Truthout that the Navy consistently avoids conducting environmental impact statements, using the segmentation strategy Sullivan mentioned. One example of many he provided entailed the Navy ignoring impacts from vessel operations in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound in compiling an environmental assessment regarding Coast Guard vessels escorting naval submarines into the Sound. Milner filed a comment in the Navy's EA on the issue last January.
"This type of segmenting is like building a bridge across a river, in which the agency obtains an EA for one side of the river, and [builds] half of the bridge before conducting an environmental review for the other side of the river," he said. "By then, half the project is built and the full impacts of the project are never addressed."
Given the vast scale of munitions and nuclear weapons stored by the Navy in the Puget Sound region, Milner warned that Washington State's Hood Canal is "becoming an industrial corridor. An accident at the second Explosives Handling Wharf could cause a catastrophic explosion and spread plutonium across our region."
Milner noted that the courts nearly always defer to the military when they are challenged by a lawsuit about the impacts of their plans.
Carol Miller said she has yet to see one example of the Department of Defense following the law when it comes to NEPA. She believes everyone should be concerned about how the Pentagon is handling its NEPA obligations.
"Anyone who cares about their health needs to get informed about military operations," she said. "Anyone who cares about the environment needs to understand that the Pentagon is the biggest environmental threat to Planet Earth. The military does not care about the environment, whether human or natural; it's all just terrain to them."
Several examples she provided of the military contaminating water near their bases included Camp Lejeune inNorth Carolinaand inHawaii. Miller also citedthose living downwindfrom nuclear weapons testing sites and the prevalence ofthyroid canceramong them. In fact, nuclear waste has a legacy that is popping up everywhere, even in thesuburbs of St. Louis, where the Pentagon did not bother doing anything to protect human health or the environment. Soil near a local creek in a St. Louis suburb was contaminated by nuclear weapons waste stored there during the 1960s and '70s, and led to people living there now getting sick.
The military's practice of ignoring civilians' needs and interests is widespread. Sullivan pointed out how, in 2014, the Navy failed to notify affected communities of the creation of an electronic warfare range over Olympic National Park, Olympic National Forest and the west end of the Olympic Peninsula, including tribal lands. As a result, nobody knew about the EA and nobody was able to comment.
"Immediately after the short comment period closed, the Navy issued a 'Finding of No Significant Impact' that basically said nobody was concerned about it, therefore the impacts are minimal," Miller said. "They then slammed the door and refused to accept any public comments after these communities found out about it."
Karen Sullivan also mentioned that the Navy's NEPA coordinator, John Mosher, told her there had been no Navy projects in the Puget Sound region over the last decade that had been stopped by an EA or EIS, which according to Sullivan, "means the outcomes were predetermined."
Sullivan has spent the last several years of her retirement tracking the Navy's ongoing NEPA violations in her region, and expresses frustration at the Navy's lack of concern about the impacts of its activities.
"I don't know how to say this any plainer: The Navy deliberately, routinely and chronically violates the law in order to prevent public input from altering or mitigating actions it has long decided on before initiating NEPA," she said. "After studying the Navy's NEPA compliance for several years, I believe it's safe to say that our oldest environmental law has become the doormat on which they wipe their feet."
