Byck Blog #1
Very early in the shooting of Carbon Nation (www.carbonnationmovie.com) I learned about Green Hawks in or advising the Pentagon – men like Col. Dan Nolan (US Army retired) and former CIA chief Jim Woolsey. Warriors who knew we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for a resource called oil. Resource wars are not new. As Woolsey told me, 200 years ago wars for fought for salt – the key ingredient to keeping food from rotting on long ocean voyages. (Do you know the US policy towards Japan before they bombed Pearl Harbor? We had imposed an oil blockade – preventing oil supplies from reaching their mainland.)
So now we learn that the Dept of Defense is spending $20 billion air conditioning tents “in a hot sandy place,” as Amory Lovins says in Carbon Nation (@co2nation). And our soldiers are dying delivering all that fuel that’s being wasted in the diesel generators at our forward operating bases (FOB), because fuel convoys at prime targets. This is waste upon waste: as Dan Nolan adds, our soldiers are dying while “we are basically air conditioning the desert.” Carbon Nation is about solutions. And the FOB solution is to insulate the tents with foam, reducing the fuel load to less than a fifth of what was needed before. That’s one fuel convoy for every five previously. But these solutions keep on coming. Watching Navy Sec. Ray Mabus speak last month, I was blown away by his new goal: to have his Navy (which includes the Marines) to have all of its fuel, all of it, to be U.S-made biofuel by 2020. Biofuel that uses no food sources or arable land. Biofuel 2.0.
He says he doesn’t care whether his ships and planes are fueled from petroleum sources that come from the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Hormuz; it is still a grave danger to our national security. He knows oil is going to get very expensive, it’s going to run out, and we get too much of it from countries we would never let build our planes and ships in the 1st place. As Sec. Mabus’ goal needs Biofuel 2.0, his amazing aspiration will be a story in Carbon Nation 2.0. Stay tuned.
