Asia Times Online
written by Nick Turse
Saturday June 19, 2010
Talking tough
In recent weeks, against a news backdrop of oil-soaked pelicans, Obama has been talking tough. "We've ordered BP to pay economic injury claims, and we will make sure they deliver," he announced on June 1. Days later, he rebuked the oil giant for considering plans to pay out large dividends to shareholders and for spending tens of millions of dollars on an advertising campaign to repair the company's tarnished image.
While the president has been on the verbal warpath, the US military has - with little notice - continued to carry on a major business partnership with BP, despite the company's poor environmental record.
Repeat offenders
As an institution, the Pentagon runs on oil. Its jet fighters, bombers, tanks, Humvees and other vehicles burn 75% of the fuel used by the DoD. For example, B-52 bombers consume 47,000 gallons (178,000 liters) per mission, and when an F-16 fighter kicks in its afterburners, it burns through $300 worth of fuel a minute. According to an article in the April 2010 issue of Energy Source, the official newsletter of the Pentagon's fuel-buying component, the DoD purchases three billion gallons of jet fuel per year.
Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the DoD has been consuming vast quantities of fuel. According to 2008 figures, for example, US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan used a staggering 90 million gallons per month. Given the base-building boom that preceded Obama's Afghan surge, the 2010 figures may be significantly higher.
In 2009, according to the Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), the military spent $3.8 billion for 31.3 million barrels - around 1.3 billion gallons - of oil consumed at posts, camps and bases overseas. Moreover, DESC's bulk-fuels division, which purchases jet fuel and naval diesel fuel among other petroleum products, awarded $2.2 billion in contracts to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Another $974 million was reportedly spent by the ground-fuels division, which awards contracts for diesel fuel, gasoline and heating oil for ground operations, just for the war in Afghanistan in 2009.
The Pentagon's foreign wars have left it particularly heavily dependent on oil services, energy and petroleum companies. An analysis published at Foreign Policy in Focus found that, in 2005, 145 such companies had contracts with the Pentagon. That year, the DoD paid out more than $1.5 billion to BP alone and a total of $8 billion taxpayer dollars, in total, to energy-related firms on what is a far-from-complete list of companies.
In 2009, according to the Defense Energy Support Center, the military awarded $22.5 billion in energy contracts. More than $16 billion of that went to purchasing bulk fuel. Some 10 top petroleum suppliers got the lion's share, more than $11.5 billion, among them big names like Shell, Exxon Mobil and Valero. The largest contractor, however, was BP, which received more than $2.2 billion - almost 12% of all petroleum-contract dollars awarded by the Pentagon for the year.
While one exceptionally powerful department of the federal government has been feeding money into BP (and other oil giants) with abandon, BP has consistently run foul of US government regulators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
According to the Center for Public Integrity, "BP account[ed] for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the [oil] refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years."
Records obtained by the center demonstrate that between June 2007 and February 2010, BP received a total of 862 citations, mostly for alleged violations of "OSHA's process safety management standard, a sweeping rule governing everything from storage of flammable liquids to emergency shutdown systems".
Of these citations, 760 were considered "egregious willful", which OSHA defines as a violation even more severe than those committed due to "plain indifference" or evidencing "intentional disregard for employee health and safety". As a result, BP faces $90 million in penalties that the company is currently contesting.
Over those same years, BP received around $5.7 billion in federal contracts, according to official government data. In fact, the $2.2 billion the Pentagon paid to the oil giant in 2009 accounted for almost 16% of the company's nearly $14 billion in annual profits.
This fiscal year, the US military has already awarded the company more than $837 million, inking its latest deal with BP in March.
Nonetheless, the DoD has devoted significant resources to publicizing its green efforts. The commander-in-chief has even lent a hand. On March 31, Obama stood in front of a "green" F-18 Hornet fighter designed to run partly on bio-fuels and announced to the nation that he was proposing to open large new areas off the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling. Less than a month later, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the weeks since, despite Obama's tough talk, his reported "anger and frustration" and his efforts to identify the proper "ass to kick," as well as the Pentagon's much-touted green-energy initiative, the US military continues, as Shachtman points out, to burn "22 gallons of diesel [fuel] per soldier per day in Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100,000 a person annually".
In other words, as a direct result of war-making in distant lands, taxpayer dollars, including those from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, will continue to flow into BP coffers, even as more wildlife dies, more beaches are fouled and more livelihoods are lost in the Gulf of Mexico.
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