The U.S. military is the largest user of fuel in the world. Especially jet fuel. Get our people out of Iraq and we can cut those needs dramatically, thus cutting the price of oil substantially.
It is amazing that no one in politics or the media has made this simple observation. Supply and demand for oil are on a knife-edge, the price set and re-set constantly on the floors of commodity exchanges like the New York Merc. Given the conservation now going on across America, prices should have started falling by now.
They haven’t. Because the U.S. military keeps grabbing up supply.
Smart defense suppliers know this. But their plans for "oil free by 2050" don’t yet call for the military to move away from hydrocarbons. Instead they want to develop tar sands and oil shale for military fuel use. These fuel sources are actually worse for the environment than oil itself, because of the energy needed to extract the resource.
But there is hope.
If we get out of Iraq, we can immediately cut the price to a sustainable level, then use the floor to create hydrogen-based energy forms for the military.
Wed be fighting the real war we need to fight — the war against oil.
It’s all about energy independence. We can’t be energy independent so long as we’re using oil. The price will always be tied to supply from other countries. We can only gain energy independence based on renewable sources, based on wind, solar power, geothermal power and water power which are turned into hydrogen and burned in fuel cells or rockets.
Once military planners are forced to recognize this simple fact, and begin acting on it, you have the same economic impacts we saw from Apollo, and from the Cold War, whose innovations include the Internet. You take money out of the equation, you focus on the goal, and when you meet the goal you release the technology for civilian use.
If we’re going to have a military industrial complex, shouldn’t it be used to benefit the U.S. instead of Saudi Arabia?
