Think $5.00 a gallon is a high price for gasoline!?! Well we are paying a lot more than that through our health and the environment; and yes, YOU are paying that! It is not just an externality shuffled off onto someone else, but borne onto all America-living, tax-paying households with the additional opportunity costs of investments that could have supported education, health, infrastructure and so on, supporting instead the devaluation of our livelihoods. The health costs of the U.S. energy policy, are felt across the country, in respiratory and asthmatic conditions, illness leading to missed work days, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and premature death. Tailpipe emissions are the largest contributor to health costs from oil as particulate matter contributes “nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide” to the atmosphere, all with documented adversities to health. Realize, that you can sit in a car running in your garage and die. “Hotspots” where such concentrated exposures overlap with populations of people have grown as urbanization has expanded around many U.S. metropolitan areas.
The National Research Council estimated that oil-driven transportation is costing us approximately $56 billion per year with more than 90% of that estimate linked to the value of life years lost to premature death attributed to air pollution. Then there are oil subsidies for $4 billion this year and an estimated $46.2 billion over the next decade for an industry that is more profitable than ever! Such subsidies encourage pollution while discouraging alternatives. Other costs associated with our oil consumption is through military spending to guard choke-points like the Strait of Hormuz, that over 50% of the world’s supplies must pass through, gobbling up 11-13% of our defense budget ($67.5 billion to $91 billion). Of our approximately $44 billion monthly trade deficit 62% ($27 billion), of that was for this one commodity alone. Add to that the multiplier effect of the dollars leaving our economy in the transfer of our wealth for overseas supplies. For example, such a ripple effect, could generate $1.70 for every dollar spent on manufacturing in the U.S., for service around $1.20 or on infrastructure which could generate around $1.59 for every dollar spent here.
[BusinessInsider.com. “The Stunning Cost Of America's Dependence On Oil”]
Simply switching to electric vehicles isn’t the answer either, when that power is derived from coal. A Harvard study analyzing the full impact of the life-cycle of coal, from mountaintop removal, processing and combustion, estimates that the American public pays at least $300 billion in health costs and deaths, causing more damage than the value of electricity actually produced, making it a net value-subtracting industry. These health and economic costs spread onto the American people by polluting energy demonstrate that tax-dollars better spent could be used to power our needs from the sun, wind and water instead.
The above waste on oil and coal alone may not be enough to convert U.S. energy entirely to renewable production, but becomes quite feasible when combined with other inefficiencies that deteriorate our human and environmental resources. The Department of Defense is ripe with such opportunities! An example is the useless production of C17 cargo planes. Though there is agreement across the board that the C17 cargo planes are not needed, the program remains due to the strategic gaming of the system that uses the jobs it creates as leverage. Strategic subcontracts in politically powerful networks and the vulnerability to crony capitalism created by the Department’s lack of transparency, has worked to keep the program in place year after year.
[The Institute for Policy Studies. “Green Dividends”. Data compiled by Robert Miller/IPS; map designed by Stimson Center.]
However, green job equivalents for all of the military positions currently on the numerous bases could shift production towards greening our energy. For example, avionic and aircraft assemblers can become light-rail or electric auto assemblers, industrial mechanics can be wind power engineers and so on. Simple alternative spending scenarios comparing $1 billion spent on the military, clean energy, health care, education, and for tax cuts to increase consumption, have found that redirecting from the military to the latter sectors, creates substantially more jobs overall. Specifically, tax breaks would contribute 28% more jobs, clean energy would generate 48% more than in the military, health care 69% more, and education 151% more than what the same $1 billion would produce in military spending. The 2013 budget proposal allots $525.4 billion in discretionary funding for defense. This while the U.S. battle fleet is already larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which are allies. In 2010, the United States invested about $8 billion on green technology while China invests $9 billion… a month. Under Portugal’s, new clean energy program, wind farms have helped the country move from 17% of its energy from renewable sources just five years ago, to 45% of it today. Of all these costs to the American people, the most concerning is the human cost to our health and the environment which our future livelihoods depend on. The vast collective power of U.S. taxpayers could and should be put to more healthy and efficient use.
