Question: who is the single largest consumer of petroleum products in the world?
Answer: the United States military, at a staggering 350,000 barrels of oil a day.
One F-15 fighter jet uses the same amount of oil in one hour that the average American uses in their car for an entire year.
Just a bit of environmental cost of war that doesn't get really discussed.
Another bit could be considered the lasting environmental legacy of WWII. Truk Lagoon, an atoll archipelago in the Pacific had been a mooring spot for the Japanese fleet, and was the scene of a bombing raid by American forces that destroyed nearly the entire force.
The bottom of Truk Lagoon is littered with the many corpses of battleships and fuel tankers. They are now beginning to leak, and beautiful Truk Lagoon, with the shared blue horizon of sky and sea, smells like a gas station.
Looking around a map of lagoons in the Pacific, around Indonesia and Malaysia, it begins to get scary; the spots where either a Japanese or an American ship was sank are many...very many, and the environmental toll from their eventually leaking oil and munitions into the surrounding ocean remains to be seen.
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