Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 21

The Pentagon is the largest consumer of petroleum in the United States. In recent years it has used between 130 million and 145 million barrels of oil annually—comprising 2 percent of America’s total petroleum demand. That translates to nearly 400,000 barrels per day, roughly the total daily energy consumption of the United Arab Emirates. Over the last century, no institution has done more to propel America’s rise to power than our military—or consumed more oil in the process. We have petroleum to thank for building the Department of Defense into an asyet-unmatched fighting machine—but our troops are only as powerful as the flow of fuel that sustains them.

“And herein lies the dilemma. Oil makes this country strong; dependency makes us weak,” noted Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College who wrote the books Resource Wars and Blood and Oil.

I was baffled and hopeful when I read about Zilmer’s memo in a September 2006 issue of USA Today. Here was a no-nonsense Marine Corps general who has served more than thirty years in the U.S. military (not your typical tree-hugger) stationed in a country that’s virtually floating on an ocean of oil (Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, after Iran and Saudi Arabia) demanding clean energy solutions that only a few years earlier had been regarded as rinky-dink hippie technology suitable only for yurts and Earthships. Zilmer’s plea struck me as a clear harbinger of change in America’s attitudes about energy. If there was ever an opportunity to “man up” the effete image and role of solar panels, wind power, and other fossil fuel alternatives, this was it. Just think of what the Pentagon could do to fast-track alternative-energy innovations going forward—after all, it was military R & D that led to the invention of jet airplanes, helicopters, radar, remote-control mechanisms, cell phones, global positioning systems (GPS), microchips, and the Internet.

But for all the promise it augured, Zilmer’s memo also carried overtones of despair that spoke to the massive challenges that come with fueling the military—one more oil-dependent today than ever before in history. The newspaper story left me wondering: How did the American military get so hooked on petroleum? How much does it really cost—in both blood and treasure—to fuel war? What would it take to transform the world’s biggest and strongest military into a petroleum-free enterprise? And how did this become the primary concern of a man leading 30,000 troops?

The current imbroglio in Iraq, I would learn as I researched twentieth-century military history, is by no means the first war tied to oil. It’s the culmination of decades of foreign policy and international relations that have been deeply connected to, and shaped by, petroleum. For the better part of a century, oil has not just been fueling our military equipment and shaping our battle strategies; it has also been provoking the very wars in which these machines and tactics are deployed.