Foreign policy and China-admiring columnist Thomas Friedman, showing once again he has his finger on the pulse of American politics and a discerning eye on what people truly care about, devoted his Sunday column (complete with unironic title) on how the U.S. military is making itself more environmentally conscious than the Taliban, perhaps enabling the United States to "break our oil addiction": "The U.S.S. Prius [1]."
As I was saying, the thing I love most about America is that there's always somebody here who doesn't get the word - and they go out and do the right thing or invent the new thing, no matter what's going on politically or economically. And what could save America's energy future - at a time when a fraudulent, anti-science campaign funded largely by Big Oil and Big Coal has blocked Congress from passing any clean energy/climate bill - is the fact that the Navy and Marine Corps just didn't get the word.
God bless them: "The Few. The Proud. The Green." Semper Fi.
Spearheaded by Ray Mabus, President Obama's secretary of the Navy and the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Navy and Marines are building a strategy for "out-greening" Al Qaeda, "out-greening" the Taliban and "out-greening" the world's petro-dictators. Their efforts are based in part on a recent study from 2007 data that found that the U.S. military loses one person, killed or wounded, for every 24 fuel convoys it runs in Afghanistan. Today, there are hundreds and hundreds of these convoys needed to truck fuel - to run air-conditioners and power diesel generators - to remote bases all over Afghanistan.
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Unlike the Congress, which can be bought off by Big Oil and Big Coal, it is not so easy to tell the Marines that they can't buy the solar power that could save lives. I don't know what the final outcome in Iraq or Afghanistan will be, but if we come out of these two wars with a Pentagon-led green revolution, I know they won't be a total loss. Wars that were driven partly by our oil addiction end up forcing us to break our oil addiction? Wouldn't that be interesting?