This is unbelievable. Imagine that this output of gases never occurred. But, having happened, drawing the conclusion that it can't easily be stopped due the requirements of continuous wars. A similar graph tells of the fossil fuel consumption during this period, a figure with serious repercussions at the civilian end of the symbiotic relation. For instance, one can imagine the urgency to frack delayed maybe indefinitely. Look:
Trillions of British Thermal Units. A Brown study finding: "The US Department of Defense is the world's single largest consumer of oil - and as a result, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters." If you combine this information with the knowledge that, on top of this military wastage of energy and its subsequent environmental destruction, the US civilian impact on the environment has had an outsized influence on changes in the climate.
The Mueller, I mean, Milley Report comes as an answer to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) mandating that the Pentagon investigate and reveal the likely impact of climate change on the military during the next 20 years, but their scope is for 50 years. The Report covers a lot of areas: Rising sea levels, saline pollutions of fresh water supplies, melting ice everywhere, infrastructure targeting, especially electric grids, extreme temperatures, unparalleled migrations, increased range of insect-borne diseases and viruses, and food fights galore (think: John Belushi coming in to mow down a Pearl Harbor GMO factory). The sources of the Army's information and analysis is largely mainstream media and governmental reports -- NPR, Stratfor, Business Insider, WHO, CDC, Gates Foundation, USDA, WaPO, etc. Again, with the symbiosis.
Once the Milley report has established that it acknowledges the reality of Climate Change, its next endeavor is to determine if the Army (and, by extension, the other DoD forces) can make the necessary adjustments to avert and mitigate the environmental horror show ahead. The Report offers up four possible likely scenarios of action: one) Powers that be continue denying there's climate change and we suffer catastrophes; two) Powers that be continue denying there's climate change and but they go through the pouty motions of doing something about and we accidently avert disaster; three) Powers that be agree that we're already in deep sh*t and decide to do something about; and (four) Powers that be agree that we're already in deep sh*t and decide to do nothing about it, because of the a**hole Factor. It's all in the Report (page 6). Alright, may I have the envelope please? The Option we choose, says Vanilla Milley, is to do Number Two. Say, and kinda do. We'll go through the, er, vowel motions.
Spoiler Alert! (Did you close your eyes for this part?) The Milley conclusion is: Ixnay on the Hombre. We're toast. Fin. Well, at least that's the conclusion you'd have to draw, when the Report makes it clear that to achieve a change of habit, and not lose our humanistic religion, we'd have to stop seeing Big Pharma, Big Oil and Big Food as Elvis in his prime and more like the late-stage Elvis on the pills. It's not enough to say, We tried. But the Report makes clear that the Army (and by extension the entirety of the DoD, and probably government: see charts above) intends to make the best of a bad situation, to see the silver lining in cloud -- even if it means seeding the cloud with nitrates (no, really, I almost fell of the chair, and I'm in a recliner!).
Let's take some examples from the Report. Bangladesh is a write-off, as the seas rise like Neptune in no mood for humor. I know you're thinking like me, well, if we know this far in advance that the Bangs are taking another hit, shouldn't we be saving them? We're told explicitly (page 8):
As seas rise and huge areas of Bangladesh become uninhabitable, where will tens of millions of displaced Bangladeshis go? How will this large scale displacement affect global security in a region with nearly 40% of the world's population and several antagonistic nuclear powers?
And this is basically all that Milley has to say about rising seas. All that work by the Bard from Duluth and George Harrison down the tubes. Only "Wah Wah" remains. Maybe Dylan will donate some of his whiskey profits to a good cause.
And water. What'll we do about water's dwindling supplies, not only because of the arrogant pollution of what we have, but also because of the intrusion of salt into our fresh water supplies as oceans rise. Sayeth the Report, "Salt water intrusion into coastal areas and changing weather patterns will also compromise or eliminate fresh water supplies in many parts of the world." That could be a problem, given that we hump like rabbits and double the human population like it's fuckin Moore's Law (almos 8 billion now), and the Inconvenient Truth that the human body is about 60% water, with the vital organs even higher. Will there be water wars for diminishing resources. Well, what do you think, doofus? The Report seems to ask rhetorically, adding "By 2040, the global demand for fresh water projects to exceed availability. As water availability decreases, the opportunity for social disruption will increase." Uh-hunh.
This brings up one of the crazier ideas the Milley Reports supports. The military, in their wars to protect all of us, will need hydration replenishment if they are to succeed in their mission. As their aqua vitae supplies diminish onnacounta, they have decided to invent a water extraction machine that will pull water right out of the atmosphere. Like a magic trick. But with science. After all, the Report says, "The combination of expeditionary soldiers fighting in a hot climate with scarce water supplies exacerbates logistical requirements." (page 13) Yeah, but how will they get the water out there in the global boonies?
"One of the most recent developments is in the area of atmospheric water gathering. Some researchers estimate there may be as much as 13 trillion liters of water in the air," the Report tells us, and "we" just need to come up with "a device called a water harvester."
We might have to filter the water, but charcoal will be readily available as cities burn to the ground. Thirsty for the future, lad? The Pentagon won an Ignobe Prize for the Gay Bomb (2007), and you can expect a return to the award podium for this one, too.
(We'd like to be sure that, at least, the best and the brightest are on the job to save mankind from himself. But I dunno. The water harvester idea is daft, IMHO, but Bill Gates' vision of carbon extractors has to be in the running for an Iggy prize. Reminds me of the air purifier I required to last the winter in Istanbul, many years ago, when they insisted on burning soft coal. But I don't see these Gates of Hell extractors doing the trick. Do you? Plus, readsay rumors say that these machines create enormous piles of solid turd-like material. After all, based on physics, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, what happens to the carbon?)
And on it goes with the US infrastructure. The Report raises the usual fears that our grips might be squeezed by foreign adversaries -- probably the Russians or the Chinese. But, as Ashley Dawson points out in People's Power (OR Books, 2020), the American grid system is a hodgepodge of regional systems not easily taken down wholesale. Dawson notes,
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