ov. 6).
“I think that we can get that within a year after Copenhagen,” he said.
A significant portion of war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan was taken by convoys providing oil to the military, according to a report released by a consulting firm yesterday.
Deloitte LLP’s study found a tenfold increase in the Defense Department’s oil consumption since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a 175 percent increase in oil use per day, per soldier, since the Vietnam War.
The number of trucks traveling rough roads in remote areas, whose primary cargo is fuel, has “skyrocketed” in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the rate of exposure of military personnel to “improvised explosive devices (IEDs),” the report says. IEDs accounted for about 43 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq between July 2003 and May 2009, the study found.
IEDs also accounted for 38 percent of fatalities in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2008 and will likely account for more than half of military personnel deaths in fiscal 2009, Deloitte reported.
“Energy security is essential to reduce war time casualties,” the report concludes. “With the significant numbers of U.S. soldiers supporting the transport, logistics, and deployment of fossil fuel to the front lines, there is a call to action to reduce dependence on oil in war.”
Along with military lives lost, DOD’s heavy reliance on oil incurs a significant financial cost, the study notes.
In 2008, the Pentagon spent $16 billion to purchase 120 million barrels of petroleum, 20 percent of which supplied vehicles, planes and other equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Deloitte said.
But in June of 2008 alone, the military lost 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel as long fuel convoys were waylaid by IEDs, weather, traffic and stealing, the study says. While the military purchases fuel at about $2 to $3 per gallon, the additional expense of air and ground protection and transportation pushes the price of each gallon to $45, Deloitte said.
“This study demonstrates that the development and use of alternative energy can be a direct cause for reductions in wartime casualties and may rank on par with the business cases for development of ever more effective offensive weapons, sophisticated fuel transport tankers, mine resistant armored vehicles and net-centric sensing technologies,” the report says.
While the Pentagon and Congress have made progress in including energy-related planning into military bureaucracy, “significant progress is still required in consolidating its energy-related bureaucracy and formulating an all inclusive energy policy,” the study says.
Low-lying and impoverished Asian coastal cities such as Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta are vulnerable to “brutal” damage from climate change without global action, environmental group WWF warned Thursday.
Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions must be curtailed in “mega-cities” where global warming will affect everything from national security to health and water availability, the influential campaign group said.
“Climate change is already shattering cities across developing Asia and will be even more brutal in the future,” said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF Global Climate Initiative.
Including their suburbs, Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta now have a combined population of about 49 million, according to WWF.
It said better-off cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore also faced varying degrees of risk from climate change, such as rising sea levels, excessive rain, flooding and heatwaves.
Hong Kong could see dramatically fewer cold days per year while dengue fever appears to be spreading to previously unaffected parts of Singapore, it noted.
“Asia is the most populous and arguably the most vulnerable continent in the world because of the high risk of climate impacts and relatively low adaptive capacity,” the report said.
“Unfortunately, the full extent of climate change has likely not been fully realised,” it said, noting that temperatures in Asia have risen by one to three degrees Centigrade (two to five degrees Fahrenheit) in th