the duchy of hetkettle trophish

thither, yon asked,

I continue to be amazed with how rarely anyone will attribute any significant part of the rise in demand to the gargantuan fuel consumption of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Somalia.

Read any day’s air power report (which only covers the Air Force’s fixed-wing planes, not Army and Marine helicopters). The last item is always some millions of pounds of fuel delivered.

Every day. Just for the planes.

and you know, i never ever figured this out for myself. so, i did, in my inestimable rough-guess-kinda-way, and here it is, with links for the numbers, and some corrections.

how much gas do we use. first, a chart.

yes! we use about 10% more gas in a day than all the rest of the world put together. scary!

[and wrong. oops! we use more than the next 20 biggest users. we use "only" 44% of the total total.]

we use about 400 million gallons of gas a day. we use another roughly 110 million gallons of diesel.* a gallon of gas weighs about 6 lbs; gallon of diesel, about 7 lbs.* so that’s — carry the 3 — 3,100 million pounds a day.

we’re talking about jets. let’s add commercial jet fuel. about 57 million gallons a day. average of 6 lbs/gal. 342 million lbs.

let’s just make it 3,400 million pounds per day.

ok, now i get to look at how many pounds are in the military report. ta-da! 2.8 million pounds. less than 0.1%.

so, yeah, in conclusion, the US military is a blip in the juggernaut of american ecological destruction.

these are, i grant you, big numbers, and no matter what answers we pick for getting rid of this fuel, it will be a big project. still gotta do it!

ps. if you clicked through to the economist blurb about the chart, you saw this:

[it's] easy to see why George Bush has introduced a plan to cut petrol consumption by 20% in the next ten years.

i can count the ways for you that spurious george is pushing horseshit — but isn’t it enough that most of the reduction comes from a 1:1 replacement with corn ethanol, the single worst biofuel known to science?

pps. don’t chinese fuel use increases reduce the importance of our pollution output? that depends. with so many central americans fleeing NAFTA into our country, does that mean we get to beat up gay people?

ppps. the magic word for today’s show? “specific gravity!” that’s right.

mar 14. more of that conversation:

BaronMarius: Klare had an earlier article called “The Pentagon as Global Gas Guzzler“

hapa: ok so klare’s high estimate of use is 340,000 barrels of oil. on its own a barrel is 42 gallons, but after processing, it comes out to about 44. so that’d mean the pentagon is using 15 million gallons a day.

(what that really is that the pentagon uses 15 million gallons of petroleum products; it’s not direct barrels of oil, because many parts of a barrel of oil aren’t used for fuel, they can’t be. here we’re talking about barrels of oil sort of in equivalency.)

15 million. multiply that times the heaviest burnable product, 7 lbs, and you get 105 million pounds a day. so that gets us to 3% of what i figured, right. i don’t know how to find out how much that has changed.

at this point though we can start using some of the big numbers. for instance, US daily use of oil is 20 million barrels, or 880 million gallons, or as i’m figuring it, 6,160 million lbs. that brings pentagon use down to 1.7%.

however to be truly brutal here you have to add US coal and natural gas use which together we use more of for energy, than we do of oil, and the pentagon doesn’t use much of either, as far as i know. so if you’re talking about total fossil fuel use, the pentagon is probably under 1% of our footprint.

klare’s point in all these articles, and especially also this two parter (one two) is that the US military empowers the US domestic waste. “no blood for oil”, right? so really the pentagon’s footprint could be expanded to include almost our entire energy use, but we’re the ones who are doing the damage. they’re just our thugs.

Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it’s the death knell of this country. I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat… If you got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, well, you know, I’m just going to forget about it because the rest of me is fine? It spreads. OK? And this stuff is deadly, and it’s spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation.

—is brain cancer.

ps. haven’t people noticed that she said the religion of islam is an existential threat? i keep seeing this referred to as “compared to terrorists” — which is, again, also not an existential threat.

pps. see, so, this is the liberty that our soldiers kill and die to protect — the right to believe that innocent people are plotting to murder you so you have to kill them first — with troops — and “a country like that,” said my sweetie, “deserves to live?”

ppps. now — about these studies — i wrote them. it was my research and let me tell you something important: it’s true, what she says, because it was very difficult, to impossible, for gay couples to conceive children, until very recently, without surrogates or donated biological material. this was, i found, especially true with societies of homosexual men. if they went all gay, they died out within a generation.

terrifying stuff, i know.

pppps. hollywood is not our enemy. hollywood is our last line of defense against creeping non-pregnancy.

ppppps. that, and illiteracy, unemployment, and — wow, she’s really worried about the actual caucasian birth rate, isn’t she? i mean, like, really.

pppppps. so you see, this person, caretaker of the public welfare, doesn’t know that education and human development are primary causes of a slowing birth rate. get it? see, she’s blaming gay people for the results of her own — oh, ok — ha ha ha ha — you get it.

ppppppps. and i said she had brain cancer, because she said we had toe cancer and, see, the head is opposite from the toe, and that’s where you think, and she’s not — oh, ok.

pppppppps. “i still say that narratives are our best hope for driving the big presto-change-o.”

but people aren’t — can we correct those narratives if we knee jerk against the reciters of taboo? you have to know how to fix the logic. don’t you? you’re risking too much.

“i want to live. taboo is the shit.”

ppppppppps. it’s not ok. to her, gayness is the taboo. look what she pinned on it. follow that into her future decisions. she’s walking away from success because she doesn’t know where it’s located. it’s too big a risk.

mar 15. people still missing the point — not seeing the pressures at work — if you don’t notice the anxiety about islam, you don’t hear the cultural extinction worry.

“if you could tell us what you want, we could help, we know a lot.

“oh and read the new lester brown book.”

ps. wow. yes, the whole book is online, in pdf.

this… will be a long series.

made of all recycled material, filled with all recycled material, decorated, in non-destructive inks, with views of wild flowers. is that image approaching truth? fake flora that really didn’t cost the life of real? not replacing. neutral.

ps. i love independent meaning. not interested in binding physics and metaphysics. instead — good neighbors — mutual aid.

pps. “really. even though alloys are stronger and story abstraction plays human strength against physical systems.”

well what am i sposta say — i want sustainable democratic narratives that don’t ultimately encourage inter-national rivalries? oh, and i want to grow butterfly wings.…

“meanings to an end. and seriously — how — and why — would you spoil their party?”

probly cuz i couldn’t help it.

ppps. “gravity’ll draw them toward abundance.”

they’ll climb out, to snipe at traitors.

“omg — wtf! i quit!”

pppps. everything you throw away becomes a mekaspider that steals the souls of house cats.

repetition is for them who want to burn thems’on the screen.

so let us prepare for tomorrow. humor! honesty! good data! ok!

ready.

ps. and — hickory BBQ potato chips.

pps. wait, what was the happy ending motto. sustainability, scalability, sociability, smarts! ah, youth.