The True Cost of Oil

from Dollars & Sense:



The True Cost of Oil
What are the military costs of securing “our” oil?

By Anita Dancs


When Americans pull up to the pump, the price they pay for a gallon of gas does not begin to reflect the true costs of extracting, transporting, and burning that gallon of fuel.

Most people know that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change. Every time we drive our cars, we are sending greenhouse gases into the air, which trap radiation and warm the earth’s surface. The more the earth warms, the more costly the consequences.

But as bad as the costs of pollution and global warming are, as taxpayers we pay another cost for oil. Each year, our military devotes substantial resources to securing access to and safeguarding the transportation of oil and other energy sources. I estimate that we will pay $90 billion this year to secure oil. If spending on the Iraq War is included, the total rises to $166 billion.

This year, the U.S. government will spend $722 billion on the military, not including military assistance to other countries, space exploration, or veterans’ benefits. Defending American access to oil represents a modest share of U.S. militarism.

Calculating the numbers isn’t straightforward. Energy security, according to national security documents, is a vital national interest and has been incorporated into military objectives and strategies for more than half a century. But military documents do not attach a dollar figure to each mission, strategy, or objective, so figuring out which military actions relate to oil requires plowing through various documents and devising methodologies.

The U.S. military carves the world up into regions—Europe, Africa, the Pacific, the Middle East, South America and North America—each with its own command structure, called a “unified combatant command.” I arrived at my estimate of military spending related to securing oil by tracing U.S. military objectives and strategies through these geographic commands and their respective fleets, divisions, and other units. I only considered conventional spending, excluding spending on nuclear weapons, which is not directly related to securing access to resources. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0510dancs.html

Goes beyond DOD's "Operations and Maintenance" dollars to include the (so far) 5000 Americans killed, and the 50,000+ seriously wounded.

those lands where oil is located at our expense -blood and dollars- and turns it over to BP,Exxon,Shell and Chevron...

I heard various figures on how much oil the military uses, huge number.
So we burn up all that oil to keep current and future gas and oil for ourselves, out of Russian and Chinese hands.
And they burn up huge amounts of their energy trying to block our attempts to block them.

Insanity.

An excellent one page collection of the facts and figures of our word wide attempts to hog all the energy.

Brzezinski's roadmap, btw.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.:thumbsup: