US Military Uses 5 Billion Gallons Petroleum/Yr-Worlds Greatest Polluter

[chlamor]

-A jet fighter uses as much fuel/hr as a US motorist will use in two years

-Abrams tank gets 2 gallons to the mile (that is not a misprint)

-Aircraft carrier uses 150,00 gallons/day

-US Navy uses 16% of worlds diesel fuel/yr

So, guess who is the worlds greatest polluter.

Here's more:

Most of DOD's five billion gallons of annual petroleum use fuels weapons platforms—land, sea, and air—that are manifestly inefficient. To add a little irony, much of the fuel used by the military is exhausted moving fuel around. Of the gross tonnage moved when the Army deploys, 70 percent is fuel.

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The Army's formidable half-mile-a-gallon M1A2 tanks are powered by inefficient 1960s-design gas turbines that yield 1500 horsepower to make 68 tons dash around a battlefield at 30 mph (42 on the road). They do that pretty well. But 60- to 80-odd percent of the time, that huge turbine is idling at one percent efficiency to run a 5-kilowatt "hotel load," mostly air conditioning and electronics. Most civilian vehicles would use a small auxiliary power unit to serve such tiny, steady loads efficiently. Tanks don't, because their fuel was assumed to cost about a buck a gallon. But to keep up with a rapidly advancing armored unit on the battlefield, cargo helicopters may have to leapfrog big bladders of fuel hundreds of kilometers into theater, using much of the fuel to do so. The delivery cost can then rise to $400–600 a gallon—yet it was assumed to be zero. If the designers had known the real delivery cost, they'd have designed the tanks very differently.

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Each tank is trailed by lumbering fuel tankers. An armored division may use as much as 20, perhaps even 40, times as many daily tons of fuel as it does of munitions—around 600,000 gallons a day


http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid939.php