Unspoken cost of US military is a stunning volume of pollution

What are we not talking about after a month of war in Iran? The news will continue to question the strategy or lack thereof. It will count casualties, rising prices, the remaining days until November — but what it will not tally is the egregious cost to the planet. The numbers are dumbfounding. An F-16 in combat consumes as much fuel in one hour as the average American driver uses in three years. Forty-two F-117 fighter jets flying 1,300 combat sorties — the figure for the first month of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 — produce 52 billion pounds of carbon pollution. To match that output, a Boeing 747 would need to make more than 100,000 round trips between LAX and JFK. At 40 commercial flights a day, that’s almost seven years’ worth of aviation — for a few weeks of one war. A pair of Apache helicopter battalions burns 60,000 gallons of jet fuel in a single raid. A B-52 Stratofortress gulps 55 gallons of fuel every minute it is airborne, or 3,300 gallons of fuel per hour. Boots on the ground? Humvees get 4 miles per gallon. M-1 tanks get 1.5 to 3 miles per gallon. A single U.

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