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The Carbon Footprint of the Iraq War

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

We are familiar with the usual, wasteful, nasty, ugly, lethal things war does — all good reasons for opposing its use as international policy. There is another reason though, a big one, that has not been much discussed. Modern machine-enabled war waged at long distances (such as the ongoing United States invasion of Iraq) is hugely carbon dioxide-intensive. Its carbon footprint is huge — and no one seems to be asking exactly how large.

I have wondered how much carbon dioxide is being injected into the atmosphere by Bush and Cheney’s war — for beginners, to transport 160,000 U.S. troops and 130,000 contractors from this country to Iraq, often by air, with their equipment and provisions. As just one item of a great many, I read of the 1.4 million bottles of water per day that our troops need to stay hydrated during Baghdad’s 115- degree summer days and wonder how much jet fuel is burned to get it there? How many decades of riding a bike to work would it take for me to offset just one gardenvariety bomb — not to mention the two-ton ‘bunker busters’ used in this war? What proportion of the billions of dollars being spent on this war, I’m wondering, are ending up in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases?

In a warming world, we can no longer afford war — especially this war. Any war is a sign that human relations have failed. This one, in particular, is a betrayal of our environment. In the fog of war, the future of our habitat barely registers a second or third thought, and maybe not even that in the Middle East, where oil barons build artificial ski slopes in Dubai. (I took a pot-shot at Dubai’s ersatz ski resort in the ‘letters column’ of the May, 2007 National Geographic as a “poster child for global warming,” after the magazine had called it “a miracle in the desert.”)

We can add up the monetary cost of this war. It’s now approaching $500 billion. We also can estimate the human costs: the number of Iraqis killed and driven from their homes, and the many thousands of U.S, troops killed and seriously wounded, many of whom have been attended to in airborne emergency rooms on their way home, or to Europe. Is anyone calculating the cost of the war to the future of the planet Earth as a whole? I do not have the tools at hand to calculate the carbon footprint of the Iraq war, so I went looking in my copious files, and across the Internet, to see whether the question has been asked and any calculations ventured. I have come up, so far, with nearly nothing. When I went looking I found plenty of right-wing bloggers whining about how much carbondioxide Al Gore pumps into the air every time he jets off to show “An Inconvenient Truth.” Funny how the same questions are never asked of Exxon’s executives, on their corporate jets. Do any of them care how much carbon George W. Bush and Dick Cheney belch on Air Force One and Two? Could these bloggers be more interested in character assassination than doing anything about global warming? It’s not so funny that none of the rubber-mouth rightwing bloggers give even a second thought to the carbon footprint of war. That is to be expected, perhaps. But that neither left-wing bloggers, nor even scientists seem to be asking this question is not. So how would one figure the carbon footprint of the Iraq war?

• First, add in all the energy used to produce the weapons, transport, and other provisions that are consumed in the war.

• Add the emissions produced getting soldiers, supplies and civilian contractors to the theater of war, and home again — in the case of a war pursued thousands of miles from home, often by air transport, quite a bit. Add the cost of running their armed personnel carriers, lodgings and so forth, as well as the greenhouse gasses added by the conduct of combat itself. Add the carbon and other greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by fires initiated by bombings and other explosions. In Iraq, pay special attention to intentional sabotage of oil pipelines and suicide bombings, as well as improvised explosive devices.

• Add the carbon cost of tending the wounded. In this war, Iraq’s emergency room spans nearly half the world, from airborne surgery to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and hospitals in the United States.

• Add anything I am leaving out. I’ve probably forgotten something.

We do know this:

Don Fitz, writing in Z-Net (“What’s Possible in the Military Sector?” April 30, 2007), states: “According to the February 2007 Energy Bulletin, the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil in the world. Only 35 countries consume more oil. Yet, the official figure of 320,000 barrels of oil per day used only includes vehicle transport and facility maintenance.” Does this figure include the jet fuel used to get troops, contractors, war material and provisions to and from the Iraq war zone?

Fitz continues: “That figure does not include energy for manufacture of vehicles, energy for building and dismantling military facilities, energy for construction of roads, and energy consumed while rebuilding whatever the military blows up. Nor does it factor in energy required by the military’s partners, NASA and the nuclear industry. Additionally, whenever war or construction razes trees, it eliminates their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere” (Fitz, 2007).

The carbon footprint of the Iraq war — and modern combat in general — has yet to be tallied. But when we go to war nowadays, we now know we’re not just battling against some enemy combatant. We’re waging war on the Earth.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).