They're the single biggest polluter on earth in both chemicals and greenhouse gas emissions, their effects can be felt around the world in both rising temps and destroyed lives, in fact they're in the very business of destruction: it's the US Military. This week we are joined be researcher Dr. Patrick Bigger to discuss the paper he coauthored (Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military) covering some of the far reaching impacts of imperialist policies and what it really costs to have the most powerful military on Earth. Tune in to hear about logistics, supply chains, concrete, solar powered tanks, and so much more in our exploration of the everywhere war.
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(This is an automated transcript but it sucks, we'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this handsome transcript!
[0:06] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:08] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky the end of the world.
[0:20] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be. [0:52] Today, David, we're going to continue our series on the military, on war.
[0:57] Phzhew, pchoow, choo, choo, choo. [imitates explosions and firing a weapon]
[1:01] Ooh, I see we've upgraded our soundboard.
[1:05] Thanks to all our Patreon donations, they are really paying off.
[1:09] That's the greatest grift ever: just take the Patreon donations, tell everybody we we bought an awesome soundboard, but really we're just using our... [both imitate a variety of sounds: beeps, explosions, weapons] Anyway, send us some more money. We're talking about the military once again, David. But we're going to be talking a little bit about some of the externalities, the environmental externalities of the military. We're going to be talking with Doctor Patrick Bigger who is at Lancaster University and was one of the authors of a new paper titled ‘Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”.’
[1:44] You might have heard of this paper in the news, you probably seen this stat repeated in all sorts of media sites in the past couple of weeks that the US military pollutes more in terms of carbon emission, in greenhouse gases than the country of Portugal. Well, that's this paper and this professor Doctor Patrick bigger and his colleagues and we're very excited to talk about him later on, it's a great paper, you can find a link to it on the website if you want to read it before we start the interview: ashesashes. org.
[2:11] But before we get into the interview, David, I wanted hone in on the phrase “the everywhere war” which is in the title of that paper, because we didn't talk about the everywhere war in our interview with Patrick but I think it's an important concept in framework when we start thinking about US military operations around the world. It's a phrase that was coined in 2011 by Derek Gregory in his paper published in The Geographical Journal appropriately titled “The everywhere war.” And what he outlines is ways in which following 9/11 the United States transformed the way it conducted war in such a way that has led to the militarization of the entire planet really. And this transformation was seen most acutely in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan which was an elevation of the US military into a permanent state of war. And permanent war suits the modus operandi of US national security policy which for the past several decades has “required the US to maintain a global military presence, configure its Armed Forces for power projection and employ them to impose changes abroad.” And this escalation has not just been towards a permanent state of war but the war that is occurring everywhere: that is the everywhere war.
[3:34] The everywhere war expands as the well-defined contours of war are replaced by these nebulous gray zones, wild zones in which there's really no discernible difference between the wars of advanced militaries like that of the US or the UK, Russia, China and sectarian wars that are locally, especially in the Global South and especially-especially in the Middle East where the lines between non-combatant and combatant are often non-existent. In Afghanistan and Iraq, even the lines between forces are blurred as the US military has augmented its own forces with things like paid warlords, local militias and even the Taliban itself at various moments in these conflicts.
[4:13] But these shifts in warfare should be understood as distinctly American in conception. After all, the US is the one which has led the charge on intentionally diluting the concept of a battlefield in favor of nebulous transnational territories of war in which any individual can be put on a CIA hit list, and responsibility for all collateral damage including innocent lives lost in the pursuit of those individuals can be offloaded and ignored.
[4:44] And even further, the US has intentionally blurred these lines between what is military and what is not. So, we have our own official soldiers: these are the guys who have Army patches or Marine patches, whatever and they serve the Department of Defense, they get a government paycheck; but we also have huge amounts of private contractors, of mercenary groups, and then also we've handed over some control over advanced military weapons and even military missions to traditionally civilian organizations like the CIA. The result of all this is this very strange mishmash of what is military, what is in it, it is confusing and that also glaze over into what we consider combatants. What are good guys, what are bad guys, who counts as a combatant, what doesn’t. Entire lines of what war is which is something that's supposed to be sharp: it's a guy in uniform shooting another guy in the uniform – is now a very confusing and.
[5:40] And finally, it has been the US’s declaration of a Global War on Terror that has itself defined the whole world as an ongoing battlespace. And so, this everywhere war now let loose upon the world is advantageous to oppressive and authoritarian governments everywhere who can use the ill-defined War on Terror or War on Drugs to criminalize civilians and others who challenge state authority. “Certainly, Mexico is no stranger to military repression. During the Dirty War from the 1960s through to the 1980s, the Army was given carte blanche to put down student demonstration and guerrilla groups and it carried out disappearances and illegal detentions, torture and killing on such a scale that the United States noted an emerging security problem. The cloak for these bloody operations was the Cold War. And some scholars believe that the drug war now serves as a convenient cover for the renewed criminalization of social protest.”
[6:45] And to bring this concept to the here and now and the immediate problems that the United States finds itself facing, we can look at the US’s criminalization of migrants at the US - Mexico border. Many of whom are direct victims of this War on Drugs and of these other governmental policies that the United States have either put into practice directly or pressured other countries to do so on their behalf. And as we've seen, as the US has blurred lines at the border between civilian and military, we’ve started augmenting our own border control with military forces. And this turns the border itself into kind of a war zone and that plays out in things like drones, machine guns and ultimately up to the point where we actually have physical military detachments guarding against, what was that, the migrant caravans that the news was so panicked about – firing tear gas at children, these people who are our full-time soldiers.
[7:38] And this has precedent in the lead-up to the everywhere war. Historically the United States has been steadily increasing the militarization of the border. From the paper, “a cascading series of joint operations from Operation Blockade in El Paso in 1993 through Gatekeeper in San Diego and Safeguard in Arizona to Rio Grande in Texas in 1997 was designed to capture undocumented migrants who were held to be responsible for increased criminal activity in border cities and to deflect countless others into remote desert areas where they were knowingly exposed to death.
[8:16] In what has been indicted as an endless deferral of human responsibility their deaths were misattributed to natural causes. The risk of dying on the crossing has steadily increased. 9/11 prompted and permitted the formation of a still more intensive military security nexus that rendered undocumented migrants even more vulnerable to an emergent necropolitics by imaginatively placing them in a war zone where they become, in effect, unlawful combatants. Many of the military units involved in border support now saw the mission as a pre-deployment exercise for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this imaginative remapping was reinforced by a cascading series of institutional, technical and cultural developments. Then, in May 2006, even as Bush pedaled the fiction that the United States is not going to militarize the southern border, he announced the deployment of 6000 National Guard troops to the border in what he hailed as the most technologically-advanced border-security initiative in American history. These measures hastened the rhetorical collapse of the alien into the terrorist. And as Rosas observed, allowed the violent subjugation of immigrants to the special relation of illegality.”
[9:40] And David, the US - Mexico border is just one example of many where we have been conditioned to perceive it as an area inherently violent and thus in need of a military presence. But this conditioning or perception shift is slowly being superimposed over every corner of the globe. And this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy or feedback loop if you will because military garrison outside domestic territory and the criminalization of brown people's existence that goes alongside that is itself so often the cause of violence in the first place, reinforcing this notion that a strong military presence is necessary. And today, the scale of US military operations around the world has only increased and dramatically so. Between 2015 and 2017 the US military was directly active in 76 countries including seven which have been on the receiving end of drone and missile strikes. But David, we're not here to discuss foreign policy necessarily. Why are we talking about the everywhere war?
[10:53] You got me fooled.
[10:55] Well, I just wanted to set the stage because a war that is everywhere and forever ongoing necessarily requires the burning of a never-ending furnace, right? The war machine does not just keep on rolling without a steady supply of hydrocarbon fuel and its attendant emissions.
[11:17] That sounds like a very carefully prepped PR phrase: hydrocarbon fuel and its attendant emissions. Tanks burn a lot of gas so do jets – all this stuff burns a lot of gas, let’s make this simple here. Wars expensive. You know, here in the United States we talk about the military and everything all the time.
[11:37] Things go boom boom.
[11:38] In terms of: “it's so much money, what is it? 700 billion dollars, over that every year, annually that we spend on it.” And then the discussion ends: oh, okay, that's how much it cost. If we have learned anything from this show, Daniel, it's that things never end in just a basic quantification number of dollars. There are always unforeseen costs and war is certainly no different. And the fact, as we’ll talk about in his paper as we go through the rest of this episode, those costs are incredibly high. We’ve talked previously on this show in episode 43 - FUBAR about some of the environmental damage directly that the military wages both in domestic places where we poison water supplies, poison the land, whatever but also in these pristine natural islands, they want to bomb the shit out of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. It's a great episode with an interview with a great activist, if you're not familiar with this, definitely check it out.
[12:33] But that's just the tip of the iceberg of these unforeseen unaccounted externalities that we are charging up to our bill with these ultimate climate reckoning and a lot of other unfortunate reckonings. I mean, air pollution is the number one killer in the world right now. And a lot of this fuel is extremely dirty, especially the stuff that the Navy burns, a lot of the fuel that we burn in our jets is dirty, this high-performance aircraft burns fuel much less efficiently than other aircraft and it burns it at high altitude which drips down. I mean, every single part of this is problematic, the secondary pollutants are problematic, the greenhouse gases are problematic, the United States military is one of the most major greenhouse polluters in the world. In fact, as an organization, they certainly are the single greatest. They are the single greatest purchaser of fuels as a single organization in the world. And there's a lot of other things even beyond these externalities that the paper and that later in the interview we discuss. The amount of concrete that they use for the construction of their bases, their runways, their roads, the amount of food necessary to feed and upkeep this massive military push, the land use that goes to all these bases, the huge amounts of weapon testing ranges, not just in the United States but all around the world.
[13:50] The environmental costs of this endless war that we've created are enormous. And we never see them beyond this byline in the media saying '700 billion dollars to the military this year.' And that’s where the conversation ends. And it ignores these huge costs that ultimately probably have a greater effect on each and every one of us than this money that comes out of a budget, we create the money anyway. And I don't want to get into modern monetary theory, I don’t know if we’ll ever do that on the show, that it is when we talked about doing... I have mixed emotions on some of it.
[14:21] You know, whatever, money is made of up, we printing the money, we're spending it, whatever, it doesn't matter. But these environmental costs do have very real costs. They have absolutely real impacts and, of course, this is ignoring the very real impacts of the actions that military takes where that means as they nicely summed up as collateral damage. But, you know, it's a loss of lives, oftentimes innocent people. Or if it's not the direct loss of lives, it's displacement, it's injuries, it's a pollution of areas where the people have lived for years now they can't go back – all these costs have the human toll. And then also on the soldiers themselves: both the physical health impacts of waging war gear, of carrying too much gear, destroying their knees if they make it out most ideally to, you know, very severe traumatic mental illnesses and then more serious injuries at that. And for what? Like what are we doing with all this violence? What are we running up this enormous bill for? And ultimately, of course, it's a support of financial interests of the United States, of the people in control of these, of other countries. And so, of course, when you look at it from that perspective that these sacrifices may make sense. But for everyone else on Earth who isn’t directly profiting from this, and to be fair, you know, Daniel, you and I as Americans are profiting off of it but not nearly as much as, you know, say that the CEO of Raytheon or whatever.
[15:50] Well and also considering that profit is short-term, right, like we might enjoy materially better lives today because of US imperialism but those materially better lives don't necessarily outweigh the lost social connections, the loss of community and, of course, the loss of the environment which we will depend on if we want to continue these lives of ours, right?
[16:13] I sorta need like a healthy Earth to live. But as the military very famously said in one town hall, I think it's Virginia, “we are in the business of war, not in the business of defending the environment.” So, I think that makes very clear their thoughts on that. And before I get too much into this, “there is no profit” rant that I love so much, maybe we should turn to the interview and let a real expert teach us a little bit about the military and its greenhouse emissions and the logistics of this endless war.
[16:48] We're happy to be joined now by Dr.Patrick Bigger of Lancaster University. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us.
[16:55] Thanks for having me.
[16:56] So tell us a little bit about the recent paper that came out.
[17:00] So, a couple of co-authors, Dr.Oliver Belcher at Durham University, Dr.Ben Neimark where I'm at Lancaster at the Environment Center and Cara Kennelly who is our technical assistant on this paper doing the hard work of number crunching. We tried to figure out exactly how much fuel the US military is burning on an annual basis. And it turns out that it's quite a bit. But the question wasn't just how much fuel, that's kind of an accounting exercise, we also wanted to figure out how it's even possible for the US military to procure, distribute and then burn as much fuel as an entire country. It’s like a lot of Scandinavian countries or Portugal.
[17:48] You mentioned: trying to find out how much fuel the military was using – why did you have to find it out?
[17:54] So, there's a long-running conflict basically between the military and other parts of the government and with international agreements about whether or not to report the military's greenhouse gas emissions. And this was such a big deal that the US threatened to walk away from the Kyoto Protocol negotiations if there wasn't an explicit exemption granted for military reporting which the Europeans eventually cave to along with a number of other things including the starting a cap and trade market. But then, you know, the US walked away anyway but they still kept that exemption. And so the US military has not been systematically reporting its greenhouse gas emissions. Ever. So there's some doubt that you can find here, there's reasonably good data from the Department of Energy that's been used by other researchers to come to similar conclusions as us. But instead, we just went straight to the source, we went to this really obscure little sub-agency called the Defense Logistics Agency and put in a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to get data on every gallon of fuel that they bought between 2013 and 2017.
[19:06] The Defense Logistics Agency and specifically the sub-office of energy, so this is kind of a sub-sub-agency, right, there within the Department of Defense. And then the Defense Logistics Agency Energy is a sub-office that deals with all things energy-related. And this is a pretty wild institution that nobody that I know of has really looked at.
[19:33] Because the Defense Logistics Agency effectively serves as the military's internal market for everything that it gets. So, it's the one that kind of goes outward-facing and offers, you know, request for beds and a bunch of other stuff and it buys it and then it sells it to the different branches within the military. So it's kind of a pivot point for the entire US war machine.
[19:59] Yeah, you describe it in the paper as a bureaucracy that hides in plain sight. But it also wasn't always around, right? So, how did the military procure fuel before the Defense Logistics Agency?
[20:10] So, it's got a long history, yeah, I think the military first started using fossil fuels in its coal-fired boat the Demologos in the early 19th century. And starting at that point each branch of the military just was kind of going out and buying their own stuff and had their own quartermasters who went out and bought whatever they needed. After World War II it became clear that was an incredibly unwieldy system and so one of the first things that Robert McNamara did as Secretary of Defense in the run-up to and kind of during Vietnam was to consolidate the purchasing practices of the different branches. And the very first one that they went after was energy kind of really illustrating the centrality of procuring and distributing fuel for waging modern warfare. We found these really great stats that were done by an analyst who kind of does this stuff for fun out of France showing that per soldier per day fuel consumption has gone up more than 20 times between World War II and today.
[21:25] Yeah, this is one of my favorite points in the paper. And it really illustrates how much this fuel use has increased. So during the second World War soldiers on average were using just one gallon of fuel per day. By the end of Vietnam, that was up to 9 gallons of fuel per day. And a lot of this was because of the explosion that jets required in terms of their fuel consumption. And then modern soldiers now using something over 22 gallons of fuel per day. That's like an entire tank of gas, from an American car at least, in a single day's worth of work. And that that's incredible.
[22:00] I think one of the things that's really important and maybe we'll come back to this is that a lot of that fuel is burned in the US military’s various overseas adventures but the majority of it is actually burned domestically. So it's not just that we're bringing all this fuel going out and doing air raids in East Africa or setting up forward operating bases all over Afghanistan. Most of the fuel is getting burned in the US and on various US military installations all over the world. So, the US military, even if we weren't conducting all of our sundry interventions, would still have a massive fuel consumption footprint.
[22:45] Yeah, I thought that was really interesting but it does make me wonder, how much of the domestic fuel consumption is in some way indirectly supporting foreign operations? You know, for every drone that's being operated overseas there’s got to be headquarters in the United States to support that, right?
[23:01] Yeah, for sure, and that's hopefully something we're going to tease out in future research but right now I don't think we've got data at that level of granularity to really say one way or the other.
[23:13] And this data is also fuel use specifically purchased by the military so it doesn't include all the fuel you use to build a jet or to build a bomb or something before it enters the military itself, the Department of Defense.
[23:28] Yeah, which is wild if you start thinking about those kinds of chains of carbon that link all of the different raw material going into the stuff that the military actually uses. And it also doesn't include all the other kinds of Department of Homeland Security operations. So, like this doesn't include fuel used by the CIA's drone missions. And God knows how many missions are flying on a daily basis. So, our count is definitely partial so this should be taken as an extremely conservative estimate.
[24:07] Yeah, I have a question about that. So, Patrick, you write that the US military is the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. But that's only taking into account the emissions from direct fuel consumption and purchase. When you're saying it's the 47th largest, does that mean that the other institutions on that list are also restricted in the data only on their fuel consumption? Or is the US military the 47th largest and that doesn't include all the other ways that they are admitting greenhouse gases but the data for everybody else is kind of encompassing their total greenhouse gas emissions if that makes sense.
[24:44] Yeah, that's right it's the latter. So, if we're only taking into consideration the liquid fuels and a little bit of coal that the US military burns, it would be the 47th largest national emitter. And that's taking into account every other country's total greenhouse gas emissions. And so we’ve started taking into account all the other stuff that goes in. One of my favorite things to think about, which we were trying to get some grant money to follow up on, this thinking about the amount of concrete the US has poured in the last 17 years. Because concrete and manufacturing concrete has a massive carbon footprint that isn't accounted for in the data that we that so far. They basically turned Baghdad into a maze of concrete walls.
[25:36] If you don't mind, Patrick, I want to just come back real quick to the Defense Logistics Agency. Because you mentioned that this was a direct response to the kind of clunky nature of, you know, following World War II every military branch just trying to procure their own fuel and kind of being inefficient. But you also write about how this was a response to a changing warfighting strategy by the American military. Can you talk a little bit about how warfighting itself has changed requiring the ability to consolidate fuel procurement basically anywhere in the world?
[26:11] Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing and what we have seen since Vietnam is the increasing kind of technologization of war where we got more and more high-tech kit that has more and more energy-hungry. But especially since the fall of the Soviet Union we've seen America emerge the sole superpower that very much seizes kind of post-territorial world where the US military can and will intervene anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. And in order to do so, they need access to fuel anywhere in the world. And so, this appears in more plain sight, falling Vietnam for sure but as we discuss in this paper and in another paper that I've written with one of my co-authors here, this goes back to Teddy Roosevelt in the early 20th century and the transition from coal to diesel-powered ships for the US Navy where US really starts building a global logistical system for refueling ships with diesel. It was called the Great White Fleet, right? Because the smoke that was coming out of the smokestacks was black when it was burning coal bit it moved to white exhaust coming out of the diesel-fired engines. And so, this really starts to build the global network of fuel acquisition that the US kind of continues to build over the course of the 20th century and now appears as a system of some massive number, 5000 different refueling stations located literally all over the world in every allied or at least friendly country.
[27:57] And so, it's really kind of an amazing triumph of logistics to be able to source, distribute and then burn just, you know, I think whenever we came up with was a 170.000 or 270.000 barrels of refined product today which is the size of just about the biggest refinery in the state of California has that kind of throughput.
[28:20] That's incredible when you lay the numbers out like that. And, I mean, I love logistics talk, I know we talked about it a lot on this show. But really logistics is the thing that birthed our civilization as we know it now. And it really is inexorably linked to military logistics. One figures something out, it passes it to the civilization which passes it back to military, and it’s back and forth. And throughout military history it's always been a conversation of like: yeah., you know, you have a battle strategy but really when it comes down to it, wars are won by logistics. And I guess this agency that focuses on this stuff and just the sheer enormous size of the US logistic machine is what gives them such incredible reach around the world that enables them to push their needs and desires. And at the same time, it seems sort of like a feedback loop where you have this massive logistic power and you're out everywhere but that increases your needs for access to these fuels, increases your needs to maintain his logistics and then you’re caught in this trap where you can never get out of it, you have to keep maintaining it and then you always need more to do that. And I think it's interesting that this exploding amount of fuel use which, part of its is technology-driven but part of it is also reach driven, really goes to show the consequences of that kind of Catch-22.
[29:40] Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean so, if we think about how US political, military hegemony is projected around the world and has been for the last, whatever it is, 30 years now there’s two key features, I think, and that is the use of the dollar as the reserve currency and overwhelming military superiority of the US Military. And both of those things are predicated on oil: about global oil markets being denominated in dollars and the US military effectively having unlimited access to as much oil as it wants to burn at any given time. So you really see how the two main facets of US hegemony more broadly are predicated on unlimited fuels. And we can critique that for all sorts of reasons but one reason that we really need to be thinking about that is climate change. The sheer volume of greenhouse gas emissions that the US military are pumping into the atmosphere for whatever end it is that we think the US military are pursuing. That's not my area of expertise. But it seems like a damn lot of emissions, you know. And it may not look like that much on the surface, you know, it’s like 4% of total US emissions, but if we're serious about decarbonizing the US economy and the world as rapidly as we need to to avoid a really unpredictable feedback loops, then it seems like a pretty reasonable place to start.
[31:19] Well, in one sense, you mention feedback loops here, and I think almost the US military starts becoming a factor as a climate feedback loop. Because as we see this sort of destabilization of the world because of these climate crises that occur on a warming planet, US military feels more motivated to act and do things thereby emitting more fuel and contributing to this problem. And so, they've almost created their own loop, I think it's really funny.
[31:44] Well, and they’ve got their own language to talk about this exactly, they don't come to the same conclusions that we just have here, but I think it plays really neatly: so then, the way that kind of US National Defense establishment prefers to talk about climate change is as a threat multiplier, right? So, not that the climate change is necessarily a threat unto itself but that it'll exacerbate all sorts of known and emergent risks all over the world. And so, you can see this with the way that people have talked about climate change contributing to the Syrian Civil War, right? You know, that was probably simmering anyway but maybe climate change gave it a nudge, you know, it became a threat the US decided to respond to. And so, climate change is going to produce more and more or make more and more conflicts, worst of the point where the US will decide to intervene and that can be either militarily or giving humanitarian aid or whatever, right? But in order to perform all of these operations, they have to burn massive amounts of fuel which then give rise to more intense climate change which then exacerbate more complex and that's what your feedback looks like when you think about it in terms of the climate change being a threat multiplier.
[33:01] Well, do you see the military trying to adapt to climate change in terms of fuel usage?
[33:06] Yes, so another paper that I've written with my colleague Ben Neimark who is also on this most recent paper was about the US military's biofuels project that ran from the mid-2000s up until 2017-ish. It's a really interesting program because it initially came out of Air Force program to try and make jet fuel out of coal. But that became politically unpopular because of the coal liquids being the most filthy fuels you can imagine, not just in terms of climate change but in terms of all sorts of other pollutants. Which was they started looking at the producing biofuels and what they called third-generation biofuels which were the kind where you can take kind of anything made of carbon, any kind of agricultural feedstock and refine it so well that it performed identically to the fossil fuel equivalent. And this is in response to a couple things: one of them was the rapidly rising price of oil in the mid-2000s up and culminating in 2009-2010 where oil averaged over a hundred bucks a barrel for the entire year. And so it really was starting to cut into the military's budget as massive as it was because every dollar you spend on oil you're obviously not spending on something else. But the other thing was how much oil was costing in other ways, especially the number of people in US military personnel and contractors who were dying just delivering fuel all over Afghanistan and Iraq, dying in roadside bombings. And so the goal was to really start coming up with new ways of reducing oil consumption and reducing dependence on oil. Cause remember this is also before the Shale Revolution in the US. And so, there wasn't that kind of quick seemingly unlimited oil reserve back at home. And so you have people like James Mattis saying “unleash us from the tether of fuel”, you know, come up with these new technologies that will allow us to kind of continue to intervene in this post-territorial world but with less reliance on oil.
[35:16] And so, one of the things that the military was doing was creating this third-generation biofuel but it was costing, you know, somewhat in the order of $50 to $80 a gallon compared to, you know, $4 a gallon for jet fuel. And Oil State Republicans like James Inhofe from Oklahoma just absolutely flipped his shit and made it so that it was extremely difficult for the military to buy fuel at higher than prevailing rates and that kind of killed that program. And so, the way we think about it's like it's absolutely good that the military is devoting money to developing non-fossil fuels. But at the same time, the entire point of these fuels was that they could just be dropped into existing weapons systems, but only at the time the kind of political wins changed course and we got back to using oil the very next day.
[36:13] When you also emphasize in your paper the need not just to look at the fuel source that the military is trying to use, you know, whether or not we're using solar panels on tanks, but what you kind of emphasizes that it's more important to look at the underlying supply change and infrastructure that exist to even make it possible, not just to procure fuel but to consume as much as we want in the first place. And I guess it's kind of ties into the concept of hydrocarbon fuel path dependencies. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?
[36:48] Yeah, totally. And so, just by path dependency, all we mean is that there's kind of a structure put in place to accomplish any given goal and it becomes harder and harder to break out of these structures the more entrenched they become. And the US military has an incredibly well-entrenched fossil fuel procurement, distribution and consumption kind of structure in place. And so, when we go out and spend, Jesus, however much on an F-35. Presumably, the military is going to want, if it ever becomes usable, they're going to want to be able to use that weapon system as much as possible. And that might be through whatever marginal amounts of biofuels that they’re buying but more likely it'll be done with conventional jet fuel because that is what the Defense Logistics Agency with its multibillion-dollar operating budget want, in addition to the money that it spends on fuel and its vast network of experts who are experts in mundane things, really boring bureaucratic tasks like writing contracts with local fuel distributors or operating the purchase card system so that if you're some dude working at a base you can go and fill up your truck. You know, just this absolutely sprawling bureaucratic apparatus that locks us into particular ways of procuring fuel that are not easily changed.
[38:20] And I think it's really important how you emphasize that again, it's kind of the policies that we pursue and the strategy of "warfighting" that itself kind of locks these things in. Where we like if we say: okay, we're going to commit to counterinsurgency, okay, well, that means we're going to have to go into a possibly rural country or set up a forward operating base. And that forward operating base needs a helicopter to come in and provide fuel every single day. Well, that itself is burning a huge amount of fuel just because we committed to this type of counterinsurgency strategy. And it kind of blew my mind how you outlined it. In fact, the military was burning so much fuel to deliver by air to these forward operating bases in Afghanistan that the US Agency for International Development actually stepped in and committed to building roads in Afghanistan so that it would be cheaper to deliver fuel which is like so contradictory to me. Because this is an agency, a United States agency that purports to be, you know, committed to helping develop communities all over the world: basically, rise out of poverty, develop their infrastructure, you know, kind of put people on the path towards peace and prosperity but here they are literally paving the road for fuel trucks to deliver to our military bases.
[39:47] Yeah and it's wild how much infrastructure gets built in the name of producing, in the name of doing security. I'm going to do a totally different research project on World Bank funding mechanisms for infrastructure in the Global South. And loads and loads of the justification that go into those loan programs to build seawalls or build more resilient transportation infrastructure: it’s all about security and about resilience, writing about creating societies that don't crumble in the face of climate change. And so, this isn't a discourse or a set of practices that's unique to the kind of military USA complex. It’s much broader I think in terms of development. But at the same time one of the things that I think is really ironic about the Afghanistan case in the case of Highway 1 is that you produced this road that is good for driving on and so, long after the US leaves if indeed we ever do, this is going to be a road that enables the increased consumption of fossil fuels in Afghanistan, all right. And so this road that was built for transporting one particular kind of fuel for one particular end will end up being part of the global hydrocarbon lock-in.
[41:06] Well, that goes back to that logistic talk that we had earlier, how it’s just the military spreads their logistics out everywhere and then that ends up contributing to the logistics of civilization. I mean, Eisenhower went to Europe, saw the amazing Autobahn over there, brought it back to the US. And now look what it's done for our fossil use and it’s doing the same thing to Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else. All this stuff is just so completely intertwined with each other, it's another feedback loop. I guess I'm stuck on feedback loops today.
[41:37] Hahaha, yeah. It's almost like there was a conscious effort to produce the world in this vision.
[41:45] I'm curious, and obviously, the US military is the global leader here, but have you thought about exploring these types of trends in other areas, other militaries, perhaps Great Britain's military or even BAE systems or something like that.
[42:00] You know, we have and it's something we definitely like to get into. Since the paper came out, we had a couple different NGOs reach out to us for advice on how to do similar work. And a group based in London is looking at doing the same for NATO as a whole or NATO excluding the US. So they're trying to figure out how to get ahold of that data. That might be easier now that the Kyoto protocol has done away with the military emissions exemption. But getting any kind of historical data might be a bigger challenge. And then one of the things that I'm assigning my students more recently, and I've got these undergraduate dissertation students, and I'm having them go out and look at individual set of military exercises and try to calculate the carbon emissions from, you know, Arctic War Games or something like that, the Pacific War Games and just figure out how much it cost to do these readiness exercises that are potentially made redundant or irrelevant by changing environmental conditions.
[43:09] Patrick, I wanted to ask you: what do we do about all this? Given that the US military is such as, you know, the largest institution in the world for greenhouse gas emissions and that's not even including anything else out of direct fuel consumption. How should we think about the US military going forward, what should our response be as a public?
[43:28] I think the kind of slogan that we've landed on is that the climate change movement has to be Anti-Imperialist. And so, we're glad that the US military’s environmental impacts at least showed up in political discourse in the States, you know, Elizabeth Warren had a thing about Greening the military or whatever. But we just don't think that that's enough. We don't think that that's actually a meaningful thing to say. It'd be cool if it was but actually it wouldn't, it doesn’t really matter, right. I mean like whatever is left of the anti-war movement needs to coalesce around climate and climate folks really need to start taking to account the role of US interventionism all over the world. And kind of the sheer global scale of the US war machine has to be dialed back radically. And it needs to happen for all sorts of reasons and, you know, people on the left particularly need to do a better job of coming up with a coherent modern left foreign policy. I think one part of that is coming to terms with the sprawling environmental damage that modern imperialism does. And so, yeah, one of the ways we put it is that you just got to shutter vast sections of the war machine.
[44:52] One of the interesting sources of your paper mentions how the logistic systems that the military builds for fuel efficiency is also a logistical delivery mechanism for capitalism itself. So not only are we encouraging countries all over the world to build sprawling physical infrastructures which then contribute to environmental degradation, land-use changes, greenhouse gas emissions, but we are literally reshaping political and economic structures of countries all over the world.
[45:22] Yeah, which I think maybe we can see it more with its environmental consequences now but I don't think that's necessarily new, I think we can trace US foreign policy to making the world safe for American capital back to the early 19th century. And just the way that capital and environmental degradation are kind of inextricably linked, I think, is becoming more and more clear in folks' minds. And so, when we add this third component, when we add the US military and maybe we can kind of start to see a more clear idea about the role of US empire in the world in terms of both environmental change and in economic causes and consequences.
[46:05] I'm really looking forward to this concrete paper, by the way.
[46:07] Haha, yeah, man, that shit's wild as is, you know, and there's other kind of mundane things like: how much water, clean water around the world gets burned up in various US military activities? And what is the topsoil loss rate for all the garbage food that the military feeds the troops? You know, all of our sundry interlocking environmental crises, I think, you could really kind of exemplify through the practices of US empire which is all about achieving the most impact at the lowest cost.
[46:42] Well, I’ve got a question actually. Again, I think this is sort of for myself. But, you know, we all have these, everybody is heard the memes or the like jokes about, you know: ah, there's oil there, incomes the American army, they're going to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, whatever. But now that we have had this explosion in shale oil and this very safe domestic supply, even though it's not for forever. I think a lot of people like to think it is. Has that sort of need to maintain these supply chains to places that have oil sort of dissipated? Like we see right now this escalation that's going on around Iran, at around the gulf there that is a choke point in the Strait. And I feel like 10 years ago this never would have happened because it would have been too much of a threat to global oil chain. But now that we have these other domestic supplies I feel like the US military feels like they're free to escalate without fear of impacting their own operations. Do you see some sort of change to this? And also if I'm speaking from like a strategic military guy perspective: is that may be a sign that we should be transitioning to more green militaries? I feel disgusting saying that. But with green military operations that you can be independent of these ridiculous logistics change that you're currently a slave to.
[48:08] Yeah, I mean, I think the military would really like to have it both ways, right, I think that they would like to be able to have clean energy or renewable energy, and I don't think they really care about the cleanest at the end of the day, it's more about access to cheap fuel whatever form it takes in the least dangerous way possible and in ways that frees up there their budgets to buy more of whatever it is that they buy, different kinds of weapons systems or, you know, fancier drones. But at the same time, one of their fundamental roles is to protect US commercial interests around the world and one of the US's biggest commercial interests around the world is the oil trade. And so they have to kind of be intimately bound up with oil in any number of ways. And so, I think that's what gets us to what's going on in Iran in the Strait of Hormuz right now. I think maybe that is a reasonable assessment to say that shale or the access to that much plentiful oil has maybe emboldened the US to take actions that they wouldn't have otherwise. But at the same time, the invasion of Iraq was incredibly disruptive to global energy logistics systems. They still came out of that okay even if they didn't achieve any of the other objectives.
[49:31] [LAUGHS] I got to stop and ask you here, you know, I mean you're very deep in this logistics world and you see all this mess and you see climate change and what it is doing, you’re doing all this research, you’re doing all this work for it and ultimately: what do you believe in?
[49:51] That's a really good question. And it's not something that I spend a lot of time reflecting on. And I guess I could give you the stock socialist or democratic socialist answer that I believe in people and I believe that if we work together we can really achieve amazing things and we can resist US imperialism, we can resist the continuing hegemony of the global fossil fuel industry. And I really hope that's true and I think that it is true to a large extent, and a lot of the growth, Green New Deal discourse, both here and in the US is really giving me a lot of hope. And I do believe in the central tenants of the Green New Deal and I think that we can have transformative policies. But in the short run, I believe that we have to kind of look after ourselves and not get bogged down in all of these existential threats because it just becomes too much. And so, we should be working towards a greener socialist future that doesn't imperil all, you know. [51:00] Y'all over there in the States and me over here in Britain – we're not going to be the first ones or even kind of in the middle line to really feel the impacts of climate change our sundry other interlocking environmental crises, right? Those are going to be borne by people in the Global South who contributed in the least and will feel the worst impacts. And that hella sucks. And so I think, you know, in the short-term we, I believe that we need to be working to ameliorate those impacts and at the same time rapidly reducing our contribution to environmental degradation that isn't going to blowback on us in the first instance. But also take care of yourself cause if you think about this stuff all the time you will go crazy and you will burn out.
[51:45] Yeah, and we know that too well. And that's a pretty good answer. Is there anything else you want to add, things that we missed, things that you feel like people should know before we say goodbye?
[51:54] Nah, man, I think we're good.
[51:56] Patrick, thanks so much for joining us.
[51:58] It's my pleasure, y’all. Thank you so much for having me.
[52:01] Yeah, we really appreciate it.
[52:03] Well, good luck and keep your chin up, eh? [BOTH LAUGH]
[52:05] I think we’ve gotten pretty good at hanging in there.
[52:09] Haha, all right, well hopefully we don't come up with any more reasons to get our chins down anytime soon.
[52:17] David, I don't have much to add to that interview, I think Dr.Patrick Bigger really summed it up nicely for us and he’s really doing some valuable research, some groundbreaking research on the greenhouse gas emissions of the US Military and the unforeseen consequences of that. But I do just really quickly want to read one more quote from his paper that we didn't talk about.
[52:40] Something we’ve discussed a lot on this show is the overquantification of everything. We take a forest with all its diverse habitats, its innumerable species and vast interconnections of all those that make life possible, not just enough for us but for habitats and ecosystems outside of it through the various ecosystem services. We take all of that and we reduce it to some quantifiable statistic or data on 2 x 4 lumber products. And then we convert those lumber products to a dollar value and that's really the only input that goes into the data on the health of our economy. We leave so much out. And we’ve talked about logistics on this show and how logistics kind of aims to serve that purpose, it turns the whole world into these quantifiable figures that can then be moved around and with the goal of moving them around most efficiently. But I think they sum it up really well in this paper, I just want to read this quote for you.
[53:39] Logistics is a calculative rationality insofar as it seems to abstract the movement of people, goods and services from their operational context; it then subjects these movements to logics of precision and streamlining efficiency; and finally, it (re)orients the movements along predetermined diverse relations of production and distribution to delivery times, stock-keeping unit and other values amenable to measurement and calculation." It's so interesting, David, that we're done all these calculations and we figured out how to move things around the world at breakneck speed and we have this vast sprawling military to support that. But I guess missing from our calculations are the fundamental destruction to the fabric of life that that goes along with that.
[54:31] I'm just imagining in my head this like a logistics guy in the military, he's got like an eagle on his shoulder, you know, sitting there with all these spreadsheets and he’s like: “I just can't balance the budget, sir.” And this Brigadier general or whatever walks over and, “what's the problem, we have the funding”. He’s like, “it’s not the funding issue, it's the balance of the fabric of communities in life that won't fit in, it just won't work out, we can't fight this war.” Wouldn’t it be cool if they did, though? That they have this like these bylines in a spreadsheet there like Environmental Protection, Community Enablement.
[55:06] Yeah, and then the brigadier general is like, “damn it, son, we're going to figure this out, I didn't join the military to destroy this world, I joined it to bring it together.”
[55:16] Yeah, maybe this is like our climate apocalypse military and they're like fighting, like planning out strategic attacks to like rebuild communities and stuff. I don't know, I don’t like couching the language of Everything At War and it seems, obviously, I'm in my language setting still, we’ll do this thing at some point. You know, everything these days is like God, it's a war on whatever, its War on Drugs, the war on the climate, it’s a war on bugs, I don’t know. I get so tired of this.
[55:45] The bugs are certainly losing that war.
[55:47] Yeah, the constant war though. We’re talking about endless war, we can't escape it in our language where there's not even any environmental degradation or whatever happening. But maybe it's just our brains again so eroded from this everything-endless-war. I'm exhausted, I don't know where I'm going with this. To pull back to this larger conversation, this show is so much, and I talked about this little bit in the interview, just always about logistics and this conversation is really no different. And I mean maybe to carry on with my joke a little bit here. We’ve become such masters of logistics and especially the military that it’s enabled so much incredible growth, this endless growth that has us gotten into this problem in the first place. And I guess endless growth, endless war, the treadmill of destruction you might call it, it doesn't have to though. This expertise in logistics could enable us to do incredible things in the world, to help the world. I mean, so you've heard before this fact that we grow enough food in the world to be able to feed everybody no problemo, right?
[56:54] But the problem is we can't get the food to everywhere it needs to go for whatever reasons. And that reason is typically profitability. And if we were to refocus our logistical chains, this could be solved, we could grow less food and we could grow food in a more stainable way, not have to destroy the soil, destroy everything with these monoculture crops in order to boost deals enough that we can make all the stuff profitable. If we ignore all these other things that we quantify that are the wrong things quantify then we could enable this deep understanding of logistics, moving things around the world, to build a better world. And that's exciting for me, all this information and knowledge that we've acquired in the process of destroying the world can also be used to liberate it and bring us into something better. And maybe we don’t talk about this enough on the show because so much of our conversations about logistics are like: look at this new terrible thing that happened because we created shipping containers or whatever. That same knowledge though can be liberatory. And I mean knowledge is always a double-sided sword: you can do good, you can do evil. And for some reason, we really decided to focus on the evil. But it doesn't have to be that way.
[57:59] But David, don't you think a part of the reason why so much of our tools get used for evils because maybe we as a broader public have been conditioned to just assume the technology is itself inherently good or that the market forces will themselves just direct things towards the good purposes. But we're not really making any decisions about what our goals and values as a society really are, right? It seems like this free market principle of “we'll just let the economy figure everything out”, if you just incentivize people to make money, well, everyone will just naturally do what's best for themselves and that will collectively help society move forward in progress. We've kind of abandoned societal goals, we don't come together and say: well, we have this technology, we have the ability to datify so much and we can apply artificial intelligence to sort it all, what should we do with that? Or we have the ability to organize the world in terms of logistics, what should we do with that technology? How should we organize ourselves to benefit our communities the best instead of just leaving it up to the tech CEOs who for some reason we put our faith in? And maybe it's time to really focus on our goals and values. And I think Patrick said it best when he said: look, if you want to solve this problem, you have to look at foreign policy, you have to look at the reason the United States military is waging war in the first place, you're not going to solve it by “greening” the military, you’re not going to solve it by replacing one fuel source for another which is only going to enable the military to continue doing its operations, you need to look at why it's doing those operations and decide that's a good purpose.
[59:34] Yeah, I think you’re really unto something there. I was halfway through about interrupting like: haha, Daniel, you’ve played into my trap card. But you kept going and redeemed yourself. But I mean yeah, you are right vast amounts of the economy, of the way that we organize our society are sitting around these things that like: oh, the market will sort it out. And this assumption, I guess, is that: let humans live their most "human natury” away. I mean, you can't see y'all, but I'm making air quotes: “human nature” with the assumption that human nature is greed and competition. And that if we just use that “natural drive”, more air-quotes right, for greed and competition then it's going to naturally push the market along and we’re going to get most efficient whatever, use of resources and bunch of inventions, people are going to be creating stuff cause they want to acquire more, but whatever, who cares, push it all to the side. And I mean that's what's gotten us into this mess right now, that's what's destroying the Earth and stuff. And so, I mean, even if you are one of these greed human nature people, why would you want to organize society in a way that enables some of the worst qualities of people to run unchecked? And why would you want to organize society in a way that rewards that? If you believe that greed is an innate human nature, shouldn’t you organize society in a way that naturally tries to discourage and fight that? That seems to make a lot more sense to me because this is a naturally destructive thing. And it should be no surprise that when we’ve organized society by enabling this destructive tendency of an individual that magnifies itself and destroys not only society, destroys not only ultimately civilization, but also the Earth and all life on it as well. I mean that’s the path we’re heading down to because for some reason we decided: well, let’s enable this for our own profit. Fuck that. Done. That’s stupid. If we’re going to organize a society, you know, we should step back and be like: well, let's fight these natural tendencies if we really think they're “human nature” and all my liberal use of air quotes should suggest that I don't think that. I think people are naturally cooperative, I think people naturally want to share and help each other and that we're taught not to do that and then thrown into society that really rewards backstabbing each other. And that's why CEOs are psychopaths at much higher rates than the general population and whatever. So to get back into this, we really should be taking like a very large look at ourselves as a society and saying: Is this the way we want to organize things? Are we quantifying the right stuff? And the answer, of course, is no. And has this process of quantifying the wrong stuff, of turning it into Big Data, of chewing through that date and trying to optimize and make it more efficient and more profitable is what let us down to this path of destruction that we see? And the military and its pioneering use of logistics, because war is logistics and it has been for thousands of years, and those logistics that were refined in war, trickled down in what enabled the explosive growth of society and culture and civilization for, once again, thousands of years. Go back to our earlier conversations about the creation of money, the creation of debt: a lot of that was pushed by the needs of warfare. So the very fundamental ways that we organize ourselves for thousands and thousands of years have been centered around the needs of logistics, of war, of feeding people, of paying soldiers and it all comes down to that. And so, society, human culture, it is all tied together inextricably with the logistics of war. And here we are, once more, finding ourselves in this feedback loop of increasing deaths around the world, of increasing conflicts the military is finding itself involved with because, in large part, due to climate change and then at the same time they contributing to climate change making things worse. And we're just on this path of destruction and we need at some point to interrupt it and if we don't have a dramatic step-in, a dramatic shift where we say: FUCK THIS, STOP – then we're going to keep going down this path.
[1:03:25] This is not something that can be fixed with like incremental changes, we can't like switch, as you said Daniel, to use solar-powered tanks. Though I'm working out the energy needed, I don't think those will quite work but I like the image, It’s very solarpunk, it’s cool. You know, that’s not going to do it. Elizabeth Warren, just “greening” the military is not going to do it, this has to be a total, full-stop stop of this imperialism, stop of the focus of our society on this area. And looking at ourselves individually, looking at ourselves as a society and saying: maybe we do want something better. And that we believe that that's possible.
[1:04:09] Let's turn the everywhere war into the nowhere war.
[1:04:12] No war, nowhere war?
[1:04:14] Nowhere war, nowhere, no time. Not on my watch, not on this brigadier general’s shift.
[1:04:26] We'll all be brigadier generals in the nowhere war.
[1:04:28] That's a war I look forward to serving beside you, David.
[1:04:32] You going to spend a lot of time figuring out that last little bit that we said there. But this whole episode is worth thinking about and we hope you will. You can find this paper, you can find a bunch of other papers that we read and, for the most part, didn't really include in this episode, but are interesting and worth reading nonetheless, as was a full transcript of this episode on our website at ashesashes .org.
[1:04:57] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use ads to support this show. So if you like it and would like us to keep going – you, our listener can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend or supporting us on patreon.com/ashesashescast. We really do appreciate your support. It encourages us, it helps us keep going. We're also sending stickers to many of our Patreon supporters so get on that. We also like to thank our associate producers, John Fitzgerald and Chad Peterson, thanks so much for your help. And, of course, if you want to get in touch with, send us an email, its contact at ashesashes. org. We read all of your submissions, your feedback, your thoughts and we really do appreciate it.
[1:05:44] And if you don't like email but do love talking on the phone, well, lucky for you, we've got a phone number! And we’re going to put all these phone voicemails into a giant call-in show when we get enough of them, so definitely call-in and leave us your thoughts, leave us an interesting comment or story – we’ll make something fun out of it. If you want to be a part of that, you can at this number: it’s 31399-ashes, that's 313-992-7437. We’ve also got a whole bunch of social media accounts, there are lots of fun, you can find them at @ashesashescast on whatever your favorite social media network is. And we've got a great chat community in an application called Discord, you can find a link to that on our website, just click Community - Discord and you'll find us there. Daniel and I hang out there all the time and we love talking to everybody. And we learned a lot there, I know I learned a lot, I don’t know about you, Daniel. But it's a great group of people, we’d love to have all of you there.
[1:06:42] Everyone there is ten times smarter than I am, so.
[1:06:45] Shout out to all of you.
[1:06:46] I definitely, yeah, I learned everything that doesn't go over my head.
[1:06:49] But luckily Daniel is pretty tall.
[1:06:50] Alright, let's close this out.
[1:06:52] Okay. We’ve got another conversation episode next week as we ramp up for another deep dive the following week. And we hope you'll tune in for that. But if that's not your cup of tea, don't worry, we'll be back with another one of these research-based episodes in 2 weeks. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.