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New Year's Quiz
By maudeaster on 2014-01-10 12:04:10
After this week’s deep freeze and remembering last year’s extreme weather - summer heat wave, drought in the west,
disastrous typhoon in the Philippines, wild fires in Australia, etc - my new year’s resolution is to see what else I can do to
slow down the frightening spiral of climate change. I’ve changed my light bulbs, switched to a hybrid car, increased ride
sharing, but if you and I and everyone we know does this, is this enough? Who are the really big culprits of climate change--
and what can I do about limiting their carbon fuel appetites? Here’s a quiz that helped me answer that question -
<4 Se
e¢ How much jet fuel does a B-52 bomber burn per minute? (55 gallons!) as
e Ifyou replace an SUV with a Toyota Prius to save about 560 gallons of gas a year, how long would take an F-5 fighter
jet on takeoff to use up this much fuel? (Two minutes!)
How much gas does an M1 Abrams tank use? (A gallon moves it just half a mile!)
How many gallons of fuel does it cost to keep one US soldier in Afghanistan each day? (22 gallons!)
What in fact is the largest single source of green house gas emissions in the world? (The US Military!)
When the US reports its yearly carbon emissions, what institution’s gas guzzling has been exempted? (The Pentagon,
as a result of US pressure in climate negotiations!)
My conclusion: In addition to greening up my home and how I get around, I really need to be part of the movement to cut
back the US military budget — so the Pentagon won’t be able to buy more gas-guzzling planes and tanks and won’t be
pushing the deployment of more energy-dependent soldiers around the world. I also want to push
Congress to make sure every tank and bomb blast is added into the US carbon footprint. When we see each year how much
destructive pollution the Pentagon is adding to our warming world, I think it’ll be an incentive to pay attention to the advice
of the US intelligence community since 2007: that climate change is itself a huge threat to national security, likely to
destabilize governments, lead to mass migrations and refugee crises, spread infectious diseases, increase volatility over
water resources and more. Congress should be putting resources into fighting climate change, a major cause of these
conditions, not letting our military keep adding to global warming!
