The Pentagon’s Carbon Boot Print
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/the-pentagons-carbon-boot-print/

With both France and the UK now “at war” with ISIS in Syria and joining the U.S.-led bombing mission, it’s not likely that there are many voices at the COP21 climate change negotiations in Paris who would dare to discuss what a few critics have called “the elephant in the room” – the fact that the military is not just the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products, but the greatest source of global warming and climate change.
In fact, even if the delegates wanted to formally discuss that issue, they are prevented from doing so “by demand” of the U.S. government – at least in any official capacity at conferences such as Paris COP21.
In a remarkable piece originally published by the International Action Center, Sara Flounders wrote in 2014: “There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change. It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction [my emphasis].” This astonishing revelation was recently expanded upon by Gar Smith (editor emeritus of Earth Island Journal), who wrote that “despite being the planet’s single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the Pentagon has been granted a unique exemption from reducing – or even reporting – its pollution. The U.S. won this prize during the 1998 Kyoto Protocol negotiations (COP4) after the Pentagon insisted on a ‘national security provision’ that would place its operations beyond global scrutiny or control.”
So not only is the Pentagon exempt from any climate agreements, it is also exempt from having to reduce its own greenhouse gas emission levels and exempt even from reporting those levels. Smith adds: “Also exempted from pollution regulation: all Pentagon weapons testing, military exercises, NATO operations, and ‘peacekeeping’ missions.”
 Nonetheless, despite those generous exemptions, “the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Accord, the House amended the Pentagon budget to ban any ‘restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol,’ and George W. Bush rejected the entire climate treaty because ‘it would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy’ (by which he clearly meant the U.S. oil and gas industries)."


On Sunday a Man Appeared on Our Televisions. This is What He Said.
http://disinfo.com/2015/12/sunday-man-appeared-televisions-said/