=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #223
—March 6, 1991—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE NEW WORLD
ORDER REVEALED: 15,000 POINTS OF BLIGHT.
No one can deny that the United States military has recently done
mind-boggling work. On very short notice from the
Commander-in-Chief and with few directives as to why they were
being sent, our armed forces took on Iraq–a country with a
military machine honed to the edge by eight years of war, a land
mass twice the size of Idaho, a gross national product equal to
that of Kentucky, a population of 18 million people (only 10%
smaller than the New York metropolitan area’s) and a spunky,
youthful population at that (45% aged 15 or less). Using smart
weapons–80% of the electronics for which our military leaders
were smart enough to purchase from the Japanese–and backed only
by Great Britain, France, Germany, and a handful of other
experienced warrior titans, our military creamed them, killing
roughly 100,000 Iraqi soldiers in record time and bringing what
American reporters learned to call “collateral damage” (formerly
known as death) to perhaps another 25,000 to 50,000 civilians in
only six weeks.
Despite the failure to get Saddam Hussein himself–the one Iraqi
we know of who richly deserved to die–this was an important
victory because two-thirds of the world’s known reserves of oil
lie beneath five countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates. Oil, everyone knows, is uniquely
important to our well being because it undergirds our
fastest-growing industry, which has been the rising star of Wall
Street throughout the 1980s at a time when other Wall Street
stars have mostly ended up behind bars. With the S&L industry
crumbling at a cost to taxpayers of $500 to $1000 billion, with
the nation’s banking system failing at unprecedented rates (the
largest U.S. bank, Citicorp, was bailed out in the middle of the
war by a Saudi prince who loaned the bank $590 million at 11%
interest), with the insurance industry on the ropes, with Ford
and GM suffering the largest losses ever recorded, with people
saying that America’s industrial and political leaders are too
busy lining their own pockets to provide the nation with (a) an
educational system that could improve upon our present 25%
illiteracy rate, (b) an affordable health-care system for the
steadily-growing numbers of people debilitated by asthma, cancer
and a host of other modern diseases, (c) housing for hundreds of
thousands of homeless, and so on–it’s important to have at least
one 100%-American industry growing as strongly as a toadstool in
manure. It provides a shining star of hope in an otherwise
overcast firmament. In the U.S., we (meaning private industry,
plus government at all levels) now spend $90 billion per year on
end-ofpipe pollution controls. It’s our proudest growth industry.
If we didn’t have oil, we’d be forced to shift to alternative
energy sources that are much more difficult to control
politically, such as sunlight and hydrogen fuels derived from
water, and which wouldn’t support anything like our present-day
mushrooming end-of-pipe pollution-control enterprise.
There are other benefits from oil as well. Besides providing each
of our metropolitan areas with a protective blanket of brown smog
(giving the medical community at least $100 billion in income
each year, and helping control U.S. population by eliminating at
least 30,000 people annually via respiratory distress), oil
byproducts have (a) diminished the planet’s ozone layer by 5% in
only 50 years (creating massive research opportunities for
university and NASA scientists seeking answers to the ozone
puzzle, and for industrial chemists hoping to be first to patent
the next surprise), (b) reduced crops and forests in the eastern
U.S. and Canada and in northern Europe through acid rainfall
(cutting the need for expensive, socialistic farm production
control programs, and providing higher prices for the lumber
industry by increasing the scarcity of healthy trees), and (c)
provided the raw material for the vast majority of the toxics
found in the nation’s 20,000-plus chemical dumps on the federal
Superfund-candidate list. Superfund cleanups alone will
ultimately blossom into a $100billion startup industry that
didn’t even exist 15 years ago. And we must not overlook the many
benefits from global warming–another direct consequence of our
commitment to petroleum: a phalanx of emergency response
personnel will be needed to rebuild regions where unprecedentedly
large hurricanes and tornadoes have tracked through, farm prices
will rise when food becomes scarce as the soils of the midwestern
corn belt dry up, and enormous public works projects (dams and
concrete channels) will be required to transport water from
deluged northern regions to parched southern regions.
Fortunately, Bechtel, Brown & Root, and other American
construction giants–fresh from the task of rebuilding Kuwait and
Iraq for an estimated $100 to $200 billion–will be able to hire
armies of unemployed former farmers and homeless crack addicts to
complete the desperately-needed water projects, for which we will
all naturally be required to ante up.
It must be clear to even the most hardened pacifist that the many
benefits of oil are certainly worth waging war for whenever an
opportunity presents itself. It would even be worth manufacturing
an opportunity or two, like escalating a serious but entirely
local border dispute into a raging conflagration. Thankfully, our
recent success in the Middle East carries with it nearly zero
danger that political stability will be achieved between the
haves and the have-nots in the region, so we’ll doubtless be able
to develop other opportunities to defend our oil supplies again
before too long.
Happily, the cheap, readily-available alternative to oil is
unthinkable in the present political climate: a faint-hearted
reduction in our per-capita energy consumption by caulking our
buildings to prevent heat loss; by adopting unmanly cars that get
45 miles per gallon; by refurbishing anti-individualistic trolley
systems that transported people in (and between) U.S. cities in
the 1920s until General Motors and Goodyear Tire generously
bought them up and dismantled them; by retreating backward to
embrace has-been, weak technologies like railroads instead of
modern, brawny trucks.
No, there’s little danger that these effeminate alternatives will
be favored by the present administration. Commander-in-Chief Bush
announced in the middle of the war that his national energy
strategy had only one key plank: more deep drilling to find and
develop more oil fields off the coasts of Maine, New Jersey,
Florida, California and, best of all, in Alaska’s prized Arctic
Wildlife Refuge–to pump, pump, pump and then pump some more. An
energy platform strictly for real men–oil men doing what oil men
do best–really putting it to America.
When we started this discussion based on the military’s most
recent success, we didn’t mean to imply that their contribution
to America’s industrial growth has been limited to recent months.
Over the years, they’ve played a key role creating the need for a
pollution control industry, but until now no one has ever
cataloged their contribution to the flowering of this new line of
work: inventing the ultimate technical gizmo to capture pollution
after it’s been created (a modern search for the Holy Grail), new
ways of packaging pollution for public acceptance (the
double-lined state-of-the-art landfill was the first, soon to be
followed by the doubleor triple-scrubber incinerator with its
very own ash monofill), and, of course, all of this creating a
need for a vast army of “site remediation specialists”–chemical
dump cleanup jockeys. Ability to read and write not mandatory. An
equal opportunity employer.
The military establishment is by far the biggest contributor to
pollution in America, far outstripping anything that private
industry can point to in the way of creating cleanup
opportunities. Now, finally, a new report has been issued by the
National Toxic Campaign Fund entitled, The U.S. Military’s Toxic
Legacy: America’s Worst Environmental Enemy. This important new
report details “15,000 points of blight”–enough to make the
Commander-in-Chief swell with pride as he reflects on the need
for an equal number of “points of light” to confront these
military leftovers. Actually, there are only 1579 contaminated
military bases containing only 14,401 individual contaminated
sites, ranging from jet fuel puddles floating on underground
drinking water supplies to patches of spilled plutonium covered
over (and covered up) by neglected and forgotten concrete slabs
now crumbling in the woods. They’ll cost taxpayers an estimated
$100 to $200 billion to clean up. But this report just details
domestic military creations-the many overseas contributions made
by our military remain to be cataloged appreciatively another
time. (More on this important new report in future.)
Get: THE U.S. MILITARY’S TOXIC LEGACY: AMERICA’S WORST
ENVIRONMENTAL ENEMY (Boston, MA: National Toxic Campaign Fund,
1991). Executive summary available for $2.00; full 128-page
report available for $20.00 from: Military Toxics Network, 2802
East Madison, Suite 177, Seattle, WA 98112. (206) 328-5257. Must
read.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: persian gulf war; petroleum industry; military
toxics; drilling;