Rev Left Radio - The U.S. Military Empire: Earth's Greatest Enemy

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Donate to help finish this important film here: https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/ In this episode of Guerrilla History, we are joined by Mike Prysner to discuss the devastating impact of the US military, and the forthcoming documentary that Mike and Abby Martin are putting together on this topic titled Earth's Greatest Enemy (watch the trailer here)! This is a critical and deeply underappreciated topic that we really appreciate Mike and Abby taking the effort to tell the story of.  Do us a favor, share this episode, and contribute to the finishing of Earth's Greatest Enemy if you are able to! Mike Prysner is a co-founder of March Forward, a long time organizer with the ANSWER Coalition, and is on the National Board of Directors of Veterans for Peace.  He also is a producer and cowriter for The Empire Files.  You can find out more about the documentary and the information for how to contribute to it at earthsgreatestenemy.com.  Mike can be followed on twitter @MikePrysner, Empire Files is @EmpireFiles, and Eyes Left is @EyesLeftPod. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The prince had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. Also joined as usual by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary.

Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Happy to be here. Happy to see both of you. And we have an excellent guest and really fascinating topic lined up for us. But before I have our guest introduce himself and the project that we're going to be talking about, I want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue doing what we do by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, Gorilla being spelled, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of the contributions, large or small, allow us to continue doing what we're doing.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter or whatever it's called at this period of time, whenever this episode's coming out, by looking for at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod, and you'll be able to keep up with all of the releases that we're putting out by following us there. So today we have an excellent guest and a really fascinating topic. We're joined by Mike Prysner and we're going to be talking about an upcoming documentary, which I've been really excited about for a long time, which I believe that the working title is Earth's Greatest Enemy. Feel free to correct me on that, Mike, if there's been any changes.

But Mike, why don't I just have you introduce yourself and give a brief synopsis of what this documentary is going to be? And then we're going to hop right into the conversation from there. Yeah. So I, myself and my partner, Abby Martin, have been doing a show called The Empire Files since 2015, independently since 2017. I also have a project within that called the Eyes Left podcast, which is a socialist podcast for veterans and active duty military members. Yeah. And so I've just, we've been doing this kind of reporting, adjacent reporting to the topic of the film for quite a while. prior to that, I wasn't in media. I was primarily an activist in the anti-war struggle. I became active in the anti-war movement when I got back from Iraq in 2005 and worked with many other Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans organizing against the war. And so that's actually how I met Abby. She was doing reporting on the anti-war work of soldiers that I was doing. And we met and formed Empire Files and the rest of history. And so the documentary, I mean, just the brief synopsis is it's investigating the environmental impact of the U.S. military. Of course, the only military in the world that has the size and breadth and area, you know, dwarfing, you know, even the next largest militaries combined, like the next seven largest militaries combined in terms of its equipment and, of course, the scope and the areas it covers is completely unparalleled. No, so what is the environmental cost of having a global empire? And I think many people know that fact about how the U.S. military is the world's largest polluter. I think people hear that. They say it. They believe it when they see it. But we wanted to really dig in and explore that fact. And as we've learned over the past two years of working on this project, you know, that that fact becomes larger and larger and more complicated, the more you look into it. Yeah, well, first off, I just have to say a big fan of both you and Abby's work.

You know, it's been an inspiration for Rev Left. I know I've had you and Abby on Rev Left in the past, so it's very cool to see everything you guys do, including this new documentary. I watched the trailer on YouTube, and I was already moved. I was already incredibly engaged, wanting so much more. So if that's in the indication of the film going forward, it's really important and great. And of course, I want to say this up front. We'll say this on the back end as well.

But we also want to help get funds together to complete the post-production of this film. So in order for this film to come to the masses, there's going to still be a little bit of funding needed. And we're going to link to that in the show notes. And we highly, highly encourage everybody to donate if they can. And if you can't, if you don't have money, sharing it, going on YouTube, liking it, telling your friends about it, anything is better than nothing. But before we get into the details of the film itself, I guess. I guess I kind of want to ask about your inspiration. I know you come out of the military as a veteran. Abby has always had her eye on the military empire as something that she's trying to

help other people understand and to confront. So this seems like a natural sort of topic for you two to cover together and the empire files in general to cover. But can you talk about your particular and acute motivation and inspiration for this project? Yeah. I hope it doesn't on corny, but it was having a kid is what inspired this. Um, you know, Abby and I were very focused for the last 15 years of our lives on U.S. foreign policy. This like, this kind of unacknowledged reality by the mainstream Americans that were an empire. We're a big, giant, bad empire dropping bombs on people, doing bad shit everywhere all the time. And that's kind of the world order right now. This, this, the U.S. being this big, powerful empire.

using the military to exert its influence and dominance over every other person in the world, basically. And everyone's life in the world is impacted by this state of affairs that we live in, with the U.S. being the global hegemon. So that had been our obsession for, you know, more than a decade. And that's how we found each other and started working together and all of that. And so we were very much focused on that kind, that, that topic. You know, when, uh, we had our first kid in 2020, we just had our second, a few months ago. But when we had our first kid in 2020, uh, all of a sudden I started thinking more about, uh, the future. Um, you know, I just turned 40. Um, and so I started thinking, you know, what is the world going to be like when our son is 40?

And I think for previous, you know, generations it was easier, even though climate change is something that people always knew was a thing and going to be a problem. You know, it seemed like something far off. I think we're already seeing this summer that the world when 40 years from now is going to be quite intense. It's already getting pretty intense. And so we, I started kind of having a new obsession. I mean, I started being obsessed less with U.S. foreign policy and more obsessed with, like, oh, shit, this really big, crazy thing is coming. And nobody really seems to acknowledge it or acknowledge the direction that things are headed. And, of course, there's a lot of different ways to look at that. I mean, there's, of course, extreme heat, which is going to be causing a lot of casualties, extreme weather, places that are going to become unlivable because they're too hot. or they have too much extreme weather or there's flooding. So coastal areas, coastal cities are just going to have to move inward. And then, you know, what kind of, in addition to the heat and extreme weather,

you know, what are cities going to look like when you have millions of internally displaced refugees going into cities where there's a shortage of water, a shortage of food? Those things have become extremely expensive. I think just a glimpse of the political tensions in America, under Trump, which seemed to be, you know, quite escalated and there's a lot of political violence and the militarization of the police coming out for Black Lives Matter. All of these things are just small indicators. We're in a time of very relative abundance and stability. I mean, despite all of these things we've seen over the past, you know, four or five years, we're still in a place where it's, you know, you can go out and get water. You know, you can go out and buy food, even though there's food insecurity. I mean, there's abundance. There's abundance. There's, there's. stability, a crisis really hasn't hit. And of course, the COVID crisis showed how this government will manage a big crisis. I mean, they don't really manage it. They just keep things moving for business. And so all of these things kind of started freaking me out because we're really

looking at now the crisis is here 40 years from now. It's going to be very, very bad. So that's kind of started becoming something that we were worried about quite a bit. But then that the two worlds kind of collided, you know, that was how, how are we going to prevent or how can something like that be prevented? Of course, a climate crisis is not going to be prevented. It's happening. But the question is what, who will be able to manage it and what is this government going to do and who's going to influence what's going to happen and all of that. And so this idea that the, this, back to this idea of the United States as an empire as this global hegemon, It's both its own environmental impact and how it is driving the climate crisis, both from its own direct emissions and pollution.

It's control over how other countries are going to adapt. I mean, wanting to enforce the fact that the entire world has to be a capitalist world. And of course, capitalism is completely incompatible with staving off the worst of the climate crisis and being able to prepare for it and manage it. So both its direct pollution, its influence on other countries, and then how it's going to react when there is a big crisis. And of course, its priorities will be resources and hegemony still. And so the topics for us kind of collided together where we felt, you know, maybe one of the good interventions we could make and also outlet for our anxieties, our climate anxiety, was to investigate what, what, What its role, what its carbon footprint was, what its role as a colluder was, what its role as just the, the force that will be managing the climate crisis. And so that kind of set us on this journey. We started looking into, there wasn't a lot of literature on it. So there is one book in particular that got us started called The Green Zone by Barry Sanders.

It's out on AK Press. It was released in 2009. It was the first book to try to kind of quantify all the various forms of pollution. And so that's the first thing we read that got us started on this and then, you know, did a lot of our own own investigating. And so it's, uh, so yeah, I guess in short, it's the inspiration came out of our own extreme fear and anxiety about, about what's coming and connecting that to our, the world that we were already in and analyzing U.S. militarism. Yeah, that resonates a lot with me. And I'll say it on there because we said it off air, but just we're saying again, congrats to both you and Abby on your second child. I actually had my most recent and third child in 2021, and it was, he was born in that fall, so that summer was the summer where those pictures came out of like all red skies, and it was just a crazy summer in particular, wildfires out of control. And yeah, I had a similar, basically what I would call an existential sort of crisis or almost like breakdown,

where as my son is, you know, still in the tummy ready to be born in a couple months, I'm seeing the depravities of climate change hit us harder than a lot of scientists even predicted, being so obvious and acute impacting our daily lives, going outside and trying to breathe and wildfire smoke. And yeah, it really precipitated like a really existential crisis for me. I'm thinking about, you know, my son coming into this world. It's absolutely brutal. I mean, just for people to have some context. In Phoenix right now, this summer there was something like over, I forget the amount, but three, four weeks of over 110 degrees. agree weather. The concrete was so hot that if you tripped and fell and touched your bare skin to

the concrete in Phoenix over the last few weeks, you were being rushed to the ER and the burn ward. And this is just beginning. This is just beginning. So it's incredibly scary. But we have to mobilize. We have to organize. And I think a project like Earth's greatest enemy is going to, I think, help educate people on the role that the U.S. Empire plays in perpetuating this crisis and hopefully mobilize people to try and do something about it because the clock is ticking. Climate change is already here. There's no preventing. And it's just a matter of what can we do now to prevent the absolute worst case scenario. Yeah. And I will say there's no preventing it, but there is ways to mitigate how bad it is. And every molecule of carbon that is released into the

atmosphere is going to make things a little bit hotter. And so, you know, if how, what can you really justify? And so like the military being a massive emitter. of carbon, even though there's, like, many nation states that emit more carbon. You know, nation states are supporting populations at homes, food growth, transportation, all these states are populated. The military doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever. That's of necessity to people. And so the massive amount of carbon that it's putting out, which is going to increase those temperatures that now are bordering on the limits of human habitability. I mean, places that you, humans cannot live without massive amounts of air conditioning. If you go outside, it will get too

hot and you will die. We're already seeing huge numbers of excess heat deaths. And so, yeah, there are things that can be done outside of your own preparations for the future. Yeah, I know Adnan had a question, but he dropped out for a second. So I hope that he'll be able to come back in very soon with his question. But I just want to follow up briefly and talk about how, you know, it's really interesting that we're, that you're examining not only how the how the military protects the interests of the government, but also their direct impacts on the environment, because that's something that's all too often forgotten about. So when we're thinking about pollution and when we're thinking about degradation of the

environment, emissions of various greenhouse gases, et cetera, people tend to focus primarily on industry that's producing that, which of course is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases and degradation of the environment, but they generally don't think about how the military is often propping up those industries in certain ways. You know, the extraction of the chemicals and the raw materials that are going into those industries are often done at the barrel of a gun in many cases.

You know, maybe it's not U.S. soldiers out there, you know, holding the guns at the cobalt mines. But in many cases, the United States' military is used as a coercive tool to enforce the extraction of that for the benefit of these corporations in the global north. And in addition, we also have direct emissions and environmental degradation that's done by the military. So one of the things that people do know a little bit about are this forever chemical PIFOS,

which I'm sure you've done quite a bit of work on for this documentary because it is one of the few things that actually is talked about in the media with regards to what the military has done that directly impacts the environment. But even when there's egregious news stories, it tends to slip past popular consciousness. So I remember a few years ago, there was stories about the United States military had so much PFS laying around, this so-called forever chemical because it just lasts forever, but they didn't know how to dispose of it. And they were just deciding to burn it because this is the way that they figured, you know, we can at least get rid of it out of our facilities? But of course, what did they notice then? It was going into

the atmosphere and people in the surrounding areas were having PFOS that they were inhaling because it turns out forever chemicals are forever, even if you burn them. And it was only, I believe, about a year ago that the U.S. government decided that they would no longer be burning PFOS to dispose of it. And even though the reason I bring this up is there was some articles in places like the guardian that talked about this disposal method of burning Phafos to dispose of it. Most people, when I've talked to them, you know, even well-informed people like family members of mine that read the newspaper and watch the news all the time, they had never even heard of Pthos, much less the fact that the U.S. military was burning it to try to dispose of it because they didn't

know what else to do with that. So the point that I'm making is that it's really important that the work that you and Abby are doing, is taking this look at these different, you know, different stages or different ways in which the military has a direct or indirect influence on environmental degradation and the destruction of the climate, disruption of the climate. Yes. Well, I'm sorry to tell you, but it's worse than, than you think. The PFA, I mean, have you hit on a couple of things I think are good to talk about, you

know, the enforcing extraction economy, the emissions from the military to do that. you know, if you won't need the military to go make sure we can drill oil, how much gallons of diesel are being burned just to get one of those tanks to move one mile. I mean, it's a, you know, an armored division uses about 60,000 gallons of diesel in a single day. And so those are all important things. But PFAS, of course, very important. It is really the next public health crisis. It gets some coverage now because we're seeing the high concentrations of cancer in the areas like

directly outside bases. For example, I interviewed someone for this who lives in the space coast of Florida near a lot of the military installations. Within a month, her little brother, her dad, her uncle, and the family dog all were diagnosed with cancer. So communities that live close to these military installations

are being hit with it very quickly. But PFAS is everywhere. It is getting everywhere. And because they don't go away, they can spread very easily. It's in rainwater now. It's not just from the military, but the military is a big dumper of PFS, which it's just, it's what I'm going to get to in a second. So it's going to become a, it's going to get more attention as years go by and cancer rates are skyrocketing. And it's like, oh, we're seeing now the impacts of PFAS building up in your body.

So it's, it's a case of, you know, as always, when it's in the news, it's always far, far too late for it to be in the news. The news is never proactive. It's always reactive. Yeah. Yes. And so I think that the point that I had to what you were saying, it's not that the military has a bunch of PFAS they don't know what to do with. They know PFAS is harmful. The main source of PFAS are on military bases and other places for that matter is because it has always been used in firefighting foam. It's being used. It's when you see the white foam from a fire truck, that's all PFAS. Firefighter is the number one occupational death for firefighters is cancer from PFAS. So firefighters are the first. first ones that are getting hit with this. But the DOD knows that this firefighting foam, and has known for a long time, is very unsafe. They've known the impacts of PFAS. They've known

the impacts on the people who are using it, spraying it out of the hose. And then once that foam gets into the ground, gets into the soil, gets into waterways, they know that. So they don't just have this massive storage of PFAS firefighting foam that they're like, shit, we don't know what to do with this stuff. They still use it every day on every military installation in the United States and the world. And part of that is every day you got to do maintenance. So every day, every military base in the United States and in the world opens up the PFS foam thing and just shoots it into the ground just to make sure that it's working. Every airplane hanger for jets and military aircraft in the U.S. and around the world is fitted with this massive sprinkler system

that just shoots down PFAS foam anytime there's a fire or a false alarm, which most of the time there are false alarms and massive amounts of that firefighting foam are just dumped into the hanger and then go into the soil and the water and everything else. So the DOD has known the harmful effects of PFAS. There are safe alternatives. There are very safe alternatives for firefighting foam to use that isn't the PFAS foam. But they're just not doing it. They're just refusing to do it. I mean, it's just, and I think every step of the way, no matter what kind of pollution we're talking about from the military, the DOD knows it's harmful, knows it has a catastrophic health impact on surrounding communities, including its own service members,

and has options to do something else, but they just don't. Yeah, and just quickly, I was looking for, there was a professor who leads a research institute that specifically looks at PFOS. I can't find the name, but if I come up with it, the institute that he's at, has put out some really interesting research that points directly to what you're saying. But yeah, I just want to also throw out to listeners that we've talked about this briefly in the past and in various other climate and environmental related episodes that we did. I know we talked about it in the shutdown Red Hill, Naval Pollution Disaster episode that we did with Mikey from the Oahu Water Protectors.

I believe we talked about it in our eco-despair, revolutionary optimism in the fight for the future episode. So do check out those previous episodes, but I see that Adnan, is back. So Adnan, I'm going to turn over to you to go ahead with the question that you had prepared. Oh, sure. And firstly, just thanks so much. And it does seem like these are two of the great cataclysms facing the world, the U.S. military empire, and devastation of the environment. And to bring the two together in this documentary, a very powerful really hits the kind of key issues that we need to be thinking about. I was just wondering about the research. you had alluded to that there's been a little bit of research.

I know that there's been a book by somebody associated with the cost of war project, Nita Crawford about kind of climate and military emissions. But I'm wondering just about the transparency and access to, you know, good, genuine information about the Pentagon and U.S. military's devastation. stating consequences. You know, they don't always probably want to admit to things like the poisoning of aquifers in Red Hill or the consequences of depleted uranium armaments in Iraq and subsequently. So, you know, how did you go about doing the research to really put more, you know, meat on the bones of the kind of basic point that some people are acknowledging that it's a huge

climate emission. It's a huge emissions emitter. But in addition to the emissions question, these other elements of pollution and destruction that you have to take into account to really assess the impact of, you know, the U.S. military on the environment. You know, what kind of challenges and, you know, how did you get around some of the problems of transparency and access to fill out this picture? Yeah, great question. Well, of course, the the DOD is it likes to obscure this as much as possible. And so it is difficult to get accurate information. You mentioned Neda Crawford from Brown University, who is really like the lead scholar on quantifying the carbon emissions from the U.S. military. She has a new book. I think it came out last

year that does this. But her work is limited in the sense that she doesn't have an anti-capitalist, let alone anti-imperialist perspective. And so her book, kind of come to the conclusion that, you know what, the military has been reducing its emissions a lot. And if we just cut the number of military bases by 25%, you know, then then things will be okay, which is, is not the right conclusion. We shouldn't have any military bases anywhere and can't justify the emissions from any of them. So she was important for helping us get some of the numbers. But also, you know, she's going off of numbers that are reported by, the DOD and the Defense Logistics Agency, which are good numbers in terms of, you know, they report, they don't report, the DoD doesn't report their carbon emissions. They will only report their fuel consumption. It's literally just like one math formula you plug it into to get the emissions, which they just don't take that step because they don't want to have any official military carbon emissions from. But they, so they report their fuel

use, which may be all of it. It may not be all of it. They say it's all of it. So we don't actually know. Based on what they report alone, you know, the U.S. military is a bigger carbon emitter than 140 other developed countries and more than 100 countries combined. And so it's a pretty large footprint. But I think the challenge for us was knowing that there's much more to that. I mean, we're just talking about the fuel consumption of the military and how much carbon emissions that translates to. But we know that there's those who are familiar with with climate science, there's something called life cycle emissions. You know, if you are going to go drill oil, well, what about the infrastructure and the logistics, everything that is needed to build

those rigs, build the roads, build the transportation, build the facilities to refine it? I mean, there's so much more that goes in before a gallon of fuel is burned. There's so much more of a cycle of emissions that goes in to even getting that gallon of gas to be burned. So there's other scientists who do good work on this. One is a scientist for global responsibility who has been very useful to the film who tries to calculate, quantify like the life cycle emissions of the U.S. military doing this stuff. And this is where it just starts to become so big and so complicated. We know that concrete is one of the big sources of emissions. The production of concrete produces so much carbon emissions. It's not included in fuel use for the military because why would they include, you know,

how many gallons of concrete they need to make their barriers overseas or build their bases everywhere. But if you're building a lot of bases all the time, the U.S. military is one of the largest purchasers of concrete in the world. I mean, that's something that's not added into their emissions as well. And so one of the big challenges has been to try to actually get, you know, how many million, you know, how many million megatons of carbon is the U.S. military putting out every year, million metric tons, I'm sorry. And we can't just go off of fuel consumption for that. You have to start to look at all of these other things. And that's where it's become complicated. We've relied on a lot of other scientists to do that who try to look at

these things, but not one has tried to look at all in its totality. And so we've been trying to piece together the work that different people have done. But then it gets to a point where it's it's like you can keep adding to the number and you can keep getting a more accurate picture of how much MMT in carbon the U.S. military is putting out. But at a certain point, it just doesn't matter. It's like, okay, it's a lot. You can't justify any of it. It's way too much.

And whether we can raise it by another 10 MMT, by adding this factor, it just becomes, you know, it just becomes pointless. I mean, the bottom line is it's a lot. And you can't justify any of it. And the military alone, the emissions from the military alone, if all other emissions stop is enough to continue to cause the more warming of the planet, which is going to lead to more and more deaths. And the last thing I'll say about this is when the other reason this is important to try to do this is when the U.S. is in these international climate agreements with the U.N. and the Paris. So, like, all these international gatherings, the cops that happen, you know, Biden, they all pledge, now it's Biden, but there's always these pledges, by 2050, we are going to reduce our emissions by this much. Right now it's net zero. By 2050, we'll be at a net zero, which means you don't cut your emissions to zero, but you offset them. And so it's, you know, a kind of trick to be like, oh, we'll still burn oil, we'll still drill for oil, but we'll just do these carbon capture things to offset it.

in these international agreements since Kyoto in the 90s, the U.S. has specifically lobbied to say that their military missions shouldn't be counted into them. And they successfully won that. And then all of their allies followed suit. And so when there's these big international conferences where they say, okay, we are all getting together as an international community to say, we are going to cut our this much emissions by 2050. It's just fake. It's fake because they're not counting the military. So when Biden talks about net zero by 2050, he's not. including the military emissions, which is a lot. And so what they really mean when they say they're going to cut this much, they mean we're going to cut this much minus the militaries, because you can't question that. You can't question, you know, cutting even one iota of emissions from the military is because, of course, militaries are not expendable. And so that's, I guess, the long answer to the point on emissions and that big, big question of what is really the carbon footprint of the U.S. military. And then that's really what we were starting with. We were just going to make it about that. And then once we started finding all these other different ways

that the U.S. military pollutes, destroys ecosystems, that started to make the thing a lot bigger. And so most of that, we've uncovered just going to different places and talking to people and seeing what their concerns are. And whether it's, you know, dumping the various types of chemicals that they dump much more than PFS, or it's destroying the habitats, you know, rare habitats for endangered species and stuff just to build more bases. I mean, it gets quite large and a lot of it had to be just our own on the ground investigation to find it. Just a quick mention that none, since I mentioned that I was looking for the name of this researcher, I did find it. So if people want to look up him and the work that he's done, just keeping in mind that, you know, again, it's, as Mike mentioned with the Brown University researcher, this isn't like coming from an anti-capitalist or socialist

perspective. It's just a very interesting analysis that we can utilize. The name of the researcher is David Bond. He's at Bennington University. And you can go to their website for the center that he is doing this PFS research at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action. And if you're specifically interested in the burning of PFS chemicals, you can go to Bennington.edu slash A triple F, which is short for aqueous firefighting foam, which is what Mike was talking about. So that's just my recommendation. I had read some of the research that came out from that center a few years ago. And like I said, there's no like political message here, but it is really interesting for us to take on board and, you know, learn from and then utilize it in our more political purposes.

Sorry for the interruption. Go ahead. Yeah, no, and actually really quick, there is a good, there's an article called Green Empire question mark that is a critique of Netta Crawford. book that I encourage people to check out. Yeah, and that's sort of what I wanted to follow up on is just the idea that there are certain presumptions that are built in. I mean, it's somewhat scandalous that, you know, military is cut out from the Kyoto protocols and, you know, probably the U.S. doesn't want to emphasize that that's the case, but it is known that the military is included in these calculations and cuts. And part of it is because of the presumption that

the military is necessary, it has to continue its activity. So that has to be exempted. Everything else, consumer stuff, everything else, social kind of use of fuels and social emissions. You might say that can be cut. And indeed, of course, which we should be working on that. But I guess my question here is how much of the scholarship that even exists that talks about what could be done to reduce the carbon footprint or whatever of the military is really just sort of importing kind of corporatist sort of efficiency arguments and maybe a little geopolitical as we pull back from this area, we could cut a little bit of our footprint there. But what it does is sort of kind of greenwash the U.S. Empire and, you know, kind of

make us focus on it being a better, leaner, greener, you know, military that in some ways just allows the presumption that, of course, it needs to continue. And it just prevents from really taking the more radical perspective that you're clearly taking in this film, which is like, this isn't justifiable on any level. So look at how much harm it's doing on top of the illegitimacy of these ventures. So I'm just wondering if you think that these kinds of approaches are really about greenwashing the U.S. military in the U.S. Empire. Yeah, well, it's kind of two separate things. I mean, the first being, you know, the DOD and Washington acknowledges that the U.S. military is a driver of climate change that has a lot of emissions and so forth. They don't just think that the U.S. military is necessary for their hegemony or however they want to define it. They believe it's necessary to combat climate change, even though it's the cause of climate change. They probably no one at this point believes in climate change.

change more than the Pentagon. They are projecting that because of climate crisis, there is going to be a lot of instability, more lack of access to resources, more refugees. And of course, their perspective is, well, we need a powerful military to secure our access, to the water and fuel and things that are necessary. We need our military to intervene in the wars that are going to break out in Africa and Asia and everywhere else where there's going to be conflict over the increasing cataclysm. And so their perspective is the end of the U.S. government is, you know, we need a big powerful military to deal with the disaster that is coming. I mean, we even had, Abby actually was at COP 26 and was able to confront many U.S.

politicians who are considered the leading a green politician. You know, like all the governors, like Jay Inslee and all the other governors that are considered the leading climate governors, is all the members of Congress who are considered the most environmentally conscious members of Congress. And she was able to ask them about this thing,

about why, how can we accept having this massive military knowing its carbon footprint? One of the congressmen actually told her, and this is the perfect example, is like, well, if sea levels are rising,

that means we're going to need a bigger navy. And so this is really their perspective. And so they won't let go of it even for that reason because they are planning for them to hold on to power continue the world order as they want it, they're going to

need all that equipment. The greening the military, you know, which is it is mostly not happening. I mean, it's like just a military industrial complex like bullshit thing. You know, it's like there was this, there's a new kind of Bradley fighting vehicle, which is like

an armored personnel carrier that's used at its very fuel inefficient. You know, it gets like, you know, it takes like 10 gallons to like start the engine or something like that. And so they, this company came out with a new greener, like armored personnel carrier that could replace the Bradley.

The Pentagon did a contract with them and was like, oh, look, you know, we're, we're greening the military. Now this is a more fuel efficient Bradley fighting vehicle. That new fuel efficient Bradley fighting vehicle got like point to, it was like a, the efficiency improved by like point two miles per gallon. So it was like completely negligible. Like it didn't matter. So that example I gave of an armored division burned 60,000 gallons of diesel a day, okay, you get some more fuel efficient tanks, you're burning 55,000 gallons of diesel per day.

And so the idea that you can kind of improve the fuel efficiency of just a gargantuan, massive, mechanized, armored equipment sprawl with all of these base, just giant bases everywhere, I mean, yes, of course you can. green them in the sense that you're making them all more fuel efficient, but it's all just a bunch of completely unnecessary shit that's doing unnecessary shit all day. I mean, most of the fuel consumption from the U.S. military is jet fuel. The U.S. air fleet of the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, all these aircraft put together is bigger than like the next eight largest air forces combined. It's a masses. And what are they doing all day? They're just flying around in circles for no reason. I mean, every pilot, every aircraft, every day they just go up, they fly around, they do training, they do present patrols. They're not doing anything that benefits anybody, except they're

like, well, uh, the military has this like use it or lose it policy. You know, and that's part of the problem here where it's like, if you're a commander of a unit, you get every, every year you get so much resources, fuel, ammunition, uh, explosives, all the stuff allotted to you. If you don't use it all, the next year, you get less. And so there's all this incentive to, like let's use it all. And so let's burn all the fuel that we get allotted. Let's drop all the munitions that we get. Let's shoot all the bullets that we get. All of which have big environmental costs. And it just feeds this, you know, this for-profit industry of supplying all those things. But it's just this massive, unnecessarily pointless huge thing that's just doing

dumb stuff all day at great cost to the planet and human health. And to think about, okay, let's get a, you know, let's improve the efficiency of all of those things when really the answer should be, like, let's just put this all on a scrap heap. Yeah, Brett, before you hop in, Mike, you had mentioned that Abby had confronted various politicians at the cop conference, which we also have an episode on with VJ Prashad and Chris Saltmarsh. But before Brett asks this question, we'll see if producer Dave can insert the audio of Abby confronting the politicians at the cop rate here. Wait a minute. I want a woman. I want a woman. A woman. Gender equality here. Maybe I don't. Let's see. Abby Martin with the Empire Files. Speaker Pelosi, you just presided over a large increase in the Pentagon budget. This Pentagon budget is already massive. The Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined. How can we seriously talk about net zero? If there is this bipartisan, consensus to constantly expand this large contributor to climate change, which is exempt from these conferences. Military is exempt from climate talks.

Well, I just want to use an example if I can. You know the sea level rise is an important part of, you know, what's happening to the climate. And I am not a defense person, but I've had so many talks with the Defense Department, with the Navy in particular, about how they have to respond to what's going on. So I really do think that there is no reason why what we're putting together with Build Back Better and other things can't respond to the Defense Department and have the same impact in terms of reducing emissions. And I do think that the Defense Department is very much aware of the fact that they have to play a major role, both from a strategic, as well as, you know, for the good of the world. So I don't see what we're doing in any way or, you know, increasing the defense budget

as being something that's inconsistent with climate action. I really don't. And may have I just to add that national security advisors all tell us that the climate crisis is a national security matter. It is, of course, a health matter for our children, the water they drink, the air they breathe, et cetera. It is a jobs issue between clean,

good, clean technologies being the future of our workforce and the training for all of that. It is a national security issue because of all of the conditions that climate crisis produces. I won't go into all of them, but they do cause for migration, conflict over habitat and resources, and again, a security challenge globally. And then the fourth, of course, the moral issue that we need to pass on this planet, future generations in a responsible way. Now, recognizing what you said, we recognize that as well. And a big user of fuel, there have been many initiatives over time, more successful

with more technology to convert from fossil fuel to other sources of fuel to run the military because it would make the biggest difference. Transportation, defense, these are two of the biggest, can make the biggest difference in all of that. And that is something we're very, very focused on. As I say, the Defense Department sees this systemically, that we have to stop it as a national security issue. And one way to do that is to stop our dependence on fossil fuels which exacerbate the climate crisis. With that, I thank you all for being here. Unfortunately, they're telling us they have to clean the room.

I didn't know about that. Yeah, I always think, like, how it must feel to be a politician at, like, a big conference, and you point over to, like, a, you know, innocent-looking lady, and it's Abby Martin that stands up and, like, God, damn it, it's going to make me squirmed. And you also mentioned the jets just flying around 24-7 all day. Well, Mike, they have to because alien. They're monitoring the world for aliens. That's right.

Keeping us safe. well it's the Chinese spy balloons they've got to like stop it changes week to week but um yeah like my question though is even just looking at the trailer i saw that you know you're filming in many places and i'm interested in part about where you where you filmed but also like the class divide of where most of this pollution is sort of outsourced too because we know that indigenous communities minority communities core communities the global south as a whole these are the places that when the U.S. military and Western military imperialism in general can outsource their problems, push their pollution in those areas and away from wealthier neighborhoods and communities,

they absolutely do. So where did you film? Where did this film take you? And did you notice class divides and who was the victims of this and what communities were more or less sort of protected or safe from it. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, really nobody's safe unless you're like very rich. I think the evidence of that is that, you know, even members of the military are not safe. In fact, they're kind of more unsafe. It doesn't matter if you're a general or what. You know, you're living on the base. I think an example of how, you know, like in the United States, of course, overseas, it's much worse. Within the United States, let's just look at that and imagine what it could look like for the rest of the world. In the United States, there's some kind of environmental

law that the military isn't bound by, but in some ways is accountable to in terms of remediation. So the Environmental Protection Agency has something called superfund sites, which if something is designated a superfund site by the EPA, it means the EPA has found that this area is of severe detriment to human health, and it needs to be remediated by whoever caused the pollution. There is over thousands. superfund sites in the United States. There's thousands more that should be designated superfund sites, but the EPA has its own problems. It is arm of the U.S. government. The vast majority of superfund sites are former or current military installations.

And so to fall into the criteria of, oh, this pollution is so bad, you've got to clean this up, it's mostly the military that is responsible for those levels of pollution. And so there are corporations and stuff that are, that are have superfund sites that they need to remediate. but it's mostly the military. And that's dumping in our own backyards. I mean, one of the places we visited was Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. People may be familiar with the ads everywhere for the Camp Lejeune lawsuits where you can get compensation for being poisoned. But that's kind of a perfect example.

In their own backyard, on their own base, the U.S. Marine Corps knew that it was dumping deadly chemicals into the groundwater and that there was an explosion for decades, for decades. there were massive numbers of stillborn babies and babies who died within the first couple days of life from the pollution. And it was pretty much all of military families. So, I mean, you can't really imagine a more egregious crime. The military poisons and kills hundreds, if not thousands, likely thousands of babies of their own service members. And for decades and decades and decades, nothing happened. And even now, they have not won justice. I mean, this started in the 50s. Still people die from it and still people are deserving of compensation, living with the health impacts. And so if the U.S. military is willing to use that kind of callous disregard or their

pollution and the impacts of their pollution, unlike their own people, what do you think the bases overseas are doing. And so that kind of, so that journey has kind of taken us on a couple different, there's different types of places in the empire, right? So, of course, we've, we've been to places in the United States like Camp Lejeune to see what is the impact of military pollution on American communities. You have places like Hawaii, which we visited, which we went to right after the Red Hill spill, actually worked with Mikey, who you had on your show. You know, Hawaii being, it's officially a state, but it was a sovereign nation that was conquered and taken over by the United States government, by the U.S. military, and had their ecosystems completely destroyed and gutted. I mean, you know, Pearl Harbor was the breadbasket of Hawaii. It was where all the food sources and fish farming came from. They just gutted it, dredged it up just to park their ships in. But Hawaii is a state and has representation and things like that. So there's this other kind of level. to what they're willing, but they're willing to dump on Hawaii more than they dump on the

continental U.S. In fact, there's an entire island of Hawaii that's just a bombing range for the United States military. Then we went to Guam, which is just a straight up colony of the United States. Owned by the United States, they have no representation, they have no rights. They get to vote for president, but that's about as far as their rights and representation go. The dumping and the abuse of the ecosystem in Guam is, is, is even more severe. And then we went to a place like Okinawa, which is like an unofficial, you know, colony. It's like that it's a colony of Japan, but it's also just, it's used as just one giant military base for the U.S. military.

Okinawa is somewhere where they're very concerned about PFAS and other forms of pollution. And an example of Okinawa of the other kinds of angles of this pollution is one of the places we went was this place called Hanoko Bay. Um, this is just such a great example to me of the absurdity of, um, of what the U.S. military is doing. There's this ecosystem called Hanoko Bay. It has, it's a has this rare million year old coral there. Uh, it has this, uh, this like manatee looking thing called a dugong. It's like not just a endangered species, but it's very important to Okinawan culture. And this is its habitat. Um, the U.S. already has massive bases on Okinawa. But for some reason, they want to build a base. in Hanoko Bay. Well, you can't build a base in Hanooga Bay because it's the ocean and it's a sandy floor. And so what they're doing is there's a mountain nearby. And so there's just a massive convoy of thousands of trucks. Every day, they blow up parts of the mountain, turn it into gravel, put it in these dump trucks, drive it down to the bay and dump it to create an artificial ground in the bay. They've been doing this for over 10 years, just filling this bay with gravel, destroying this habitat for all of these important things. And when you destroy ecosystems, it has reverberations everywhere. else. It's not just that one ecosystem that's destroyed. The planet is an interconnected organism. And so there's protesters that go and try to stop the construction, and they do

slow the construction dramatically by blocking these trucks and ships and stuff like that. But there's no point for them doing this. They just decided, we're going to do this. And once we started, we're not going to stop destroying this massive ecosystem as we do it. And so, yes, of course, there's this class divide where the pollution that is wrought on poorer countries, uncolonized countries, on occupied countries is much greater than the United States. I mean, we didn't even talk about Iraq and Afghanistan yet and the kind of environmental impacts from the U.S. occupation there, which I think we should talk about. But the more levels you go, the worse and worse it gets. But nobody is safe. It just gets worse, the more

marginalized and poorer you are. Yeah, this is fascinating. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final documentary because you're covering a lot of key issues and a lot of ground. I mean, you know, the fact that the U.S. military is located, you know, maybe about 500 plus basins outside the United States. In fact, actually, you could tell us, you know, maybe what the kind of current thinking on the count outside U.S. territories is, but in all of those places, you know, We've heard so many stories about servicemen's abuse of, like, you know, women in these, you know, areas. I mean, everything about the U.S. military bases, stationing of troops elsewhere is to the detriment of those societies and communities, their environment. I mean, we recall like the Vietis, you know, I mean, maybe shelling there.

I mean, this is just a history. It goes back to the 19th century with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. The reason why Hawaii was needed was as a coaling station for, you know, projecting U.S. military power in the Pacific during the era of steam power. And, of course, geopolitically, the Middle East became more significant when we enter the oil era, the petroleum era. So kind of one question that I had for you in thinking, since you're surveying this, both what's happening now and with a sense of consciousness about the long, dirty history involved, is that, you know, the U.S. military has adapted in various ways to different forms of energy and the geostrategic interests of U.S. Empire globally. what do you think are the kind of key directions or trajectories that we will be seeing, kind of mentioned a little bit how, you know, the military sees climate change as itself a threat that needs to be reacted to and responded to. But in terms of, say, green energy, you know,

the so-called, in a green energy revolution, if they're actually going to move in those other directions, what do you think are going to be the kind of geostrategic and environmental, impacts of the way in which the U.S. military adapts try and control and dominate, you know, the green energy era. Right. Well, it's a good question because the most important thing that is needed in the world right now is global cooperation to face the cataclysm of climate change into how to transition energy into a way that is sustainable. What the U.S. is doing is instead organizing the entire world to train and prepare for war. particularly with China.

So one of the places we went on this trip was the RIMPAC war games. I was crafty enough to get Abby approved to be flown out to a Navy ship in the middle of the war games in the Pacific, which they were not expecting her to show up, but anyways. Well done. Thank you. But it was a great example of the capacity of the United States to pull together the world. All these major countries coming to Rimp Pack to sit together. and say, how are we going to prepare ourselves to have a major war with China?

And so one of the things Abby was asking all of these commanders to their surprise was the big the big threat, the big existential threat we face, the big threat to quote unquote national security. Clearly, climate change is a much bigger threat than you think China is. So why are we not organizing the world to act in that capacity? And that's absolutely what's needed. And this plays into what the U.S. is doing. in terms of its own aims at transitioning and, you know, this, the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed, you know, they're calling it the most significant action ever taken by Congress on climate change, ever, which is a pretty low bar since there's basically been no action taken by Congress on climate change. And so it's a low bar to say that it's the most significant ever. But even the core of that, it's about combating China. So for the U.S. to transition, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, viewpoint of Washington is for the U.S. to transition off of fossil fuels. Well, all of the

minerals that are needed for batteries and all of the things to get off of fossil fuels, well, China is the main supplier of a lot of those minerals like lithium. And so before we can transition, we need to become a big lithium producer. So we don't have to buy it from China. Instead of a kind of cooperation with, you know, China's got plenty of lithium. They got plenty of lithium to supply the United States to transition off of fossil fuels. But we want to compete with them economically, militarily, and whatever. So instead of trying to create a relationship where the U.S. can quickly transition off of fossil fuels, first we have to become a major lithium producer.

So the Department of Defense is funding mines across a country, particularly in Alaska, which is one of the last places in that's a state where there's some kind of pristine wilderness, even though we went there for our documentary as well and found that that wasn't really the case. But places at our kind of untouched wilderness in Alaska are going to be opened up as DOD-funded lithium mines simply so that we can mine our own lithium so we don't have to buy it from China. And that being a prerequisite for being able to transition. And so it's the fact that at every level it's so wrapped up in this game of who is going to be the big global power. And we don't want other countries buying their lithium from China since they're transitioning. We want to be the supplier.

and it's all done into the guise of national security. And so these things all kind of blend together. Yeah, and I think, I mean, the point that you referenced about trying to exploit mineral resources in places like Alaska, here in Canada, for example, what are the mining capitals in terms of mining corporations as well as mining domestically? This is obviously crucial, and it highlights the important struggles that are coming ahead, especially about indigenous sovereignty over. land as capitalism and empire, you know, ramps up in this kind of green, you know, race for green independence, you know, we're going to see the sacrifice, you know, of a lot of indigenous communities, you know, to meet that globally and also even domestically. Yeah. Yeah. A crazy fact that I, so we just did a, we have, there's an empire file

substack and I just did an article about this new DOD funded mine that's open. up in Alaska, and I talk to indigenous community members who are mad about it because mines are dirty. They cause a lot of pollution. They're not good for the surrounding areas. But of these so-called critical minerals, which are the minerals needed to transition off of fossil fuels, most critical mineral deposits in the United States, most of the vast majority, are within 35 miles of an indigenous community. And so pretty much every critical mineral deposit you can mine is within the pollution zone of the few remaining indigenous communities where they can, you know, preserve their ways of life and culture. And so, you know, is the U.S. government trusted to have their best interests and work with them to make sure that they're doing everything and the way that they would want?

I would not be optimistic about that. But, yeah, it brings in a serious issue of what is this transition going to look like. will it be a just transition? But, you know, the transition is so slow anyways that I don't even, I think that it's just going to be a lot more mining and the incentivizing, oh, we'll just get more electric cars on the road versus, you know, what it actually is needed, like building some trains and shit like that. A quick quote, if I may. So I know Adnan had asked about military bases abroad. And Mike, you've been talking about how these military bases in various places, you know, directly impact. the environment and then also are, you know, propagating the harm that's taking place in these places, especially in places that have, you know, valuable natural resources. It reminds me of a quote, which I was just reminded of reading Adnan's book by Porfiro Diaz, where he said, poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,

these United States military bases that are, you know, propping up abroad, are making that the case for everybody. It's an expansion of the United States into all of these various places. You know, look at the map of where the U.S. military bases are, and you can always say, you know, insert country X, poor country X, so close to the United States. Maybe it's not close to the United States mainland, but there's a United States military base very close nearby, which is going to be exerting, you know, this, this influence on that area and, you know, having that direct impact that you've been talking about. One quick thing I want to ask about, Mike, is you know, you're talking about all of these

different places that you're going and exposing all of these things that are happening. And I know you and Abby are no strangers to exposing empire, but I would imagine that there's been at least some pushback to the, you know, the project that you're currently on right now of trying to expose the U.S. military for the destruction that it's causing to the environment. What kind of pushback are you seeing when you're going out to these various places, you know, trying to carry out this project in the various ways? Well, I would say the most relevant thing is our trying to coordinate with the DOD for interviews and access to things for the investigation. We've been open with the Department of Defense saying that we're doing a documentary on your environmental impact, but we would like your side. We'd like your responses.

We'd like to see what you know, like to give them the opportunity to sit down with us. we were referred to the DOD Entertainment Division because we're making a feature documentary and it's anything that's not we were told that anything that's not breaking news like you know you need to interview someone about some helicopter that just crashed on a military base anything that's not breaking news goes through the DOD

entertainment division so we had to go through DoD Entertainment to try to get interviews about the Pentagon's perspective of climate change and their environmental effect and all that stuff And we were told very explicitly by a panel of people at the DoD Entertainment Division that any, for them to fulfill any request to aid in any way with the documentary, which includes allowing us to interview someone from the Department of Defense, that they get final say on the final cut and script of the documentary, which would mean for us to get, for us to be able to sit down with any representative of the DOD, to respond to their impact. They would then get to see that interview, see the entire film,

and we would not be allowed to publish it without them being able to cut anything they want, not just from the interview, but the entire script of the film itself. So that's been a big barrier to be able to get a military official to be confronted with these things directly or even to just hear their perspective

or get a comment, even just getting a comment. from that responding to us requires this. So that kind of shows the level of narrative control that the military does with everything, let alone something that they know is becoming a hotter topic. But they're aware that this is becoming a thing because they've been, for the past couple years, they've been kind of starting to put out their own propaganda about climate adaptation and protecting the environment and things like that. And so they've kind of shifted a little bit.

But of course, just in their rhetoric, they're not doing anything better. But yeah. So that's been our biggest challenge is we want to say, down with someone in uniform and they're refusing to do that unless they get to edit our documentary for us. Just, Brett, very, very quick comment. Listeners, let that sink in for a second. How perverse is it that the DOD has their own entertainment division? I mean, that, that alone is just worth commenting on. But anyway, Brett, go ahead. I just wanted to, you know, let the listeners let that sink in for a second. Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely wild. We do want to be respectful of your time. So

going to wrap this up in one or two more questions here. But you did say you want to get to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it's really crucial for us to touch on that before we wrap up. I do want to say the Inflation Reduction Act was mentioned earlier. And liberals in particular promoting this as like, you know, as Mike was saying, this huge historic step. And it was like the bar is so low that doing anything is huge and historic relative to what we've been doing. But I was watching a liberal YouTuber made a whole video touting all the, like, point by point, what's in the inflation reduction. Act and you know all this optimistic music in the background like smiley aesthetics and then like

one part of it is like and the Biden administration also has opened up public lands and waters for fossil fuel drilling and extraction and then they just move on to other stuff I'm like I have replayed like three times I'm like did you not are you not conscious of what you just said right there um so even in this historic act there's still like this making way for public lands to be devoured by by private interest. Yeah, no, it's, it's the Biden administration has approved more drilling even than Trump on public land. You know, that that mine I mentioned in Alaska, it was championed by the Senator Murkowski, this Alaska senator who also was the one who made it so the Willow Project would get approved, which is another disastrous project. And so, yeah, I mean, that's, that's Washington. That's how

the sausage is made. If you want to, you want to get a concession, you got to give them something. So you got to destroy the environment a little bit if you want to save the environment. But yeah, I mean, the whole thing is just a, it's a joke. I mean, it's, it's too little, too late, and it's, you know, they're trying to placate people with these things. You know, the whole goal of putting those things in is to say, hey, we're the most green administration ever in history. So you got to vote for us instead of the other guy when it really is, you know, essentially meaningless. I mean, environmental orgs are, I didn't find any mainstream environmental orgs critical of the focus on trying to, become self-sufficient on critical minerals.

Of course, many express concern about what that will mean for indigenous communities, but the view is that this is like, you know, it will help our transition or whatever. Of course, those same, there's no environmental group that challenges the pollution of the U.S. military anymore. Greenpeace used to do it pretty dramatically, but not recently. So, yeah, I mean, it's obviously there's things to be. there's things to be happy about with it in the sense that okay now there's something happening

but if you're really conscious of where we are at in the crisis it seems like absolutely nothing if you're really honest about where we are in the crisis it it's really nothing yeah yeah so I want to move into this question and the way I want to frame it is like one of the most grotesque aspects of all of this of the military empire in general as an American

is that you know we work hard often in shitty jobs shitty conditions for shitty wages, and we hand over huge chunks of our money as tax dollars to the U.S. government. And instead of using that money to confront climate change or make sure people have health care or housing or education or anything, all of our hard-earned money goes into the pocket of the Pentagon and is spent on, like, poisoning human beings and destroying ecosystems. I really want Americans to understand that you go to work every single day and at least for a couple hours a day, you're making money to put into the Pentagon's pocket. It is a crime against everyone.

But it leads well into the question about Iraq and Afghanistan because, of course, those two wars were talking trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars to say nothing of the environmental devastation or the civilian devastation of those countries. I mean, like a meme recently said, we spent trillions and trillions of dollars and over a decade of energy and time and resources so that we could replace the Taliban with the Taliban. And it just shows the absurdity of it, but private defense contractors made a lot of money. And that's more important than the well-being of you and me or the Iraqis or Afghans or anything. So with all of that in mind, can you kind of talk about the environmental impact of the U.S. military empire and their wars, specifically in the Middle East?

Yeah. And, you know, I think we've talked mostly about the environmental impact of the U.S. military just existing. I mean, it's just it existing as a big machine that has a devastating environmental impact, just sitting there and just as existence. But what it actually is used for what it's designed for, war, that opens up a whole other kind of pollution. And I just want to preface it by saying, of course, the reason all these different various types of pollution are important is because, of course, the big. The big problem is carbon emissions because the warming of the planet is going to be the most devastating for human habitability, right? But what happens when there's one of the impacts of climate change, as many areas, as I mentioned in the beginning, are going to become uninhabitable. Places that are very hot, places subject to extreme weather, coastal regions.

There's going to be a lot less places you can live as the climate crisis progresses. So as there become areas that you can't live in because of weather or temperature or flooding, what is the quality of those lands that you can live on? And how much of that land is polluted where it is unsafe to drink water from a well or even collect rainwater to drink or grow something in the soil? And the military being such a big dumper of, you know, like there is a scholar in the 90s who found that the U.S. military produced one. ton of toxic waste per day. And of course, now that that must be much bigger. The land that may not be subjected, that will still be habitable, you know, in 40 years, 50 years or so, what is the quality of that soil and that water? And how much is the military taking away even those places? So when we look at places that I've been subjected to warfare, I think this was kind of the,

one of the biggest things that shocked me was when I interviewed that the top sculpts, the top environmental toxicologists on the impacts of U.S. war in Iraq. I'll say first, there's one form of pollution that was subjected to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan that I think people know about people like John Stewart have championed it, and that's the burn pit impact. I had a friend in the anti-war movement named Joshua Castile. We were actually on the same winter soldier panel together back in 2009. He died a few years later of a cancer related to the burn pits. President Biden's own son died from burn pits. He died from cancer from exposure to burn pits.

These are people who did one year deployments in Iraq and were breathing in burn pit smoke. Burn pits, I think a pit is a misnomer. There are the sides of like three football fields. It's just basically giant fields where everything is being burned by, you know, corporations that got paid a billion dollars to build them. And then all of the plastics and munitions and all these things just get into the shiny communities. Many, many, many, many soldiers, veterans have. contractors have died of very young ages from very aggressive brain cancers and other types of cancers from these bird pits from one year being near them. So imagine all of the communities that are around. And this thing kind of can stay in the ground and continue to cause death for a long time. But the thing that was the biggest shock to me is I think a lot of people are familiar with the huge rise in cancer and birth defects in Iraq in places like Fallujah. And I think the common misconception is this is depleted uranium.

You know, the United States dropped all these depleted uranium-tipped artillery rounds and tank rounds on all these Iraqi cities. And so you have this huge increase in birth effects, horrible birth defects, and cancers. And what I found interviewing this toxicologist is, of course, depleted uranium is causing those things. But that's not the main driver of this health crisis in Iraq. I mean, there's really nowhere safe in Iraq to live. You are at a high risk of childhood cancer, adult cancer, birth defects, things like that, everywhere in Iraq. The reason for that is, of course, any time there's an explosion, anytime a munition is fired, it vaporizes heavy metals into the air that then get into the soil, fly around in the dust, especially Iraq, especially susceptible to having dust storms.

So the most basic form of warfare is the bullet. You know what I mean? Like big bombs, artillery shells, tank rounds, all of those things cause huge amounts of heavy metals to be released into the atmosphere. So do bullets. I mean, there's no like war that's fought without bullets. It's the lowest level of munition. It's the smallest thing you can fire. The use of bullets alone in Iraq is so devastating that there is just a vaporized,

particles of heavy metals everywhere that's getting into everyone's bodies. And so, of course, you can still live there, but you are going to live there knowing that there's really no escape from these particles, and that it's going to be dangerous to have children, it's going to be, you're going to be highly susceptible to cancer, and you're going to be highly susceptible to the birth effects and things like that. And so I was like, oh, well, depleted uranium, you know, that's a thing that that shouldn't be used. Bullets shouldn't be used. I mean, there's no just to find the what you do to a place, you know, especially somewhere like Iraq, like the cradle of civilization. I mean, what a,

just like what a commentary on humanity that we go back to this place that is where so much of our history was born and just litter it with a layer of toxic dust that makes it to where, you know, children are very likely to get cancers if they are even born healthy to begin with. And, and yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to the original inspiration for the film that I mentioned earlier of, like, having a kid. And it wasn't just the, you know, what is it going to be like for my kid in 40 years? Like, what is it going to be like for every child in this world right now? Everyone who is born today. 40 years.

So, yeah, it's going to be chaos probably. It's probably going to suck in the United States for children born in the United States. But for children born in Iraq and the global, places that are going to be in the, under the gun of the U.S. military versus. like, you know, in the country, that's like the fortress of the U.S. military, the variety of things that children born today are going to be dealing with growing up in their lives, from their own environmental hazards that are just in the soil and in the air, to, you know, the problems that are going to come from shortages and stuff. It's not fun to think about, but I guess is the inspiration for continuing to do this. And I think the idea that,

even the most basic kind of warfare going and having a bunch of gunfights somewhere, even without aircraft or artillery or stuff like that, the fact that that can make a place unlivable for decades or centuries after, it should make people, and this is what we hope to do, is get the larger environmental movement and people who care about climate change, which is a lot of people, and give them that consciousness of anti-militarism and how we shouldn't, if you care about the future and the climate, we cannot accept even the most minimal form of U.S. military intervention or present somewhere.

Anywhere that there's a base, they're going to dump shit that's going to make things unlivable. Everywhere they're firing bullets, they're going to be putting stuff into the air that's going to make it unlivable. And we shouldn't accept any of it. Yeah, incredibly powerfully said, I just wanted to pop in and say that in like 2020, me and me and my wife, we lost a baby at 20 weeks. weeks or whatever. And it was an accident. It was a horrific, just, you know, active nature, but still traumatically recovering from that, that emotional impact. And I cannot imagine what people in places that have been subjected to U.S. wars have to go through and have to think about and have to fear just trying to produce a baby in a loving relationship or start a family. It's, it's

unforgivable. Well, I appreciate showing that. It's terrible. But, yeah, it's something a lot of people in the U.S. and abroad are living with every day, and it's one thing if it's, as you said, an act of nature. And it's another thing when you know that there is a culprit and someone who's done it. And not enough people are aware of that. That there is a culprit. There is an enemy. Yeah. And just one other quick comment. I don't remember the name of the book. I recently read it. It was about the legacy of nuclear weapons and the usage by the United States. And one of the things that was discussed was the impact of servicemen and women who were inadvertently used as test subjects for radiation during the nuclear tests, the hundreds of nuclear tests that

were carried out, not only by the United States, but primarily by the United States. And, you know, in many cases, these individuals were intentionally positioned down the wind of the tests to be able to determine what the impacts of the radiation would be. And the reason I bring this up is one of the quotes that stood out to me from this book. And it's not going to be exact, but it was along these lines as there was an individual who was positioned downwind of this nuclear test, who received a very high dosage of radiation. And after this, you know, a couple of years later, he and his wife were going to have a child and the pregnancy ended in a stillbirth. But the child was so deformed.

The quote was something along the lines of, you know, was it a boy? Was it a girl? Was it human? I don't know. It was a lump of flesh. And I directly blamed the U.S. military using me as a test subject for this. So, you know, that's on their own soldiers. Just imagine what it's like for people in places where the U.S. military cares even less about the people than it does about its own soldiers when that's what happens to the people that they're directly employing.

So, yeah, I just wanted to throw that out because I had recently read that. But, Mike, I do want to thank you for giving us so much of your time to talk about this project. can you tell the listeners where this project is at at the moment and how they can help, you know, get it over the line so that we can, you know, I'll take it in soon enough. Sure. So we're almost done filming. We have a few more, you know, people we're trying to go confront. And so we're working out those things. But we're mostly in post-production, editing all of the things that we've shot already and putting it together.

Of course, that's going somewhere for shoots is an expense because you're flying out a crew and going somewhere. but they're intermittent expenses, and being in post-production is very expensive because we have a full-time staff who's working audio engineer, composer, an editor, full-time editor, in addition to myself and Abby. So, you know, it's a lot of post-production left to go, many months of full-time work. And, yeah, I mean, we are one of the reasons we put that trailer out, which if you go to any of our empire files, social media, you can watch the trailer if you haven't seen it. Our YouTube Empire Files, you can see the trailer there. It's our most recent video there. So you can kind of get a sense of what it is. But, you know, there's a lot of work to go to finish it.

And we need funds to do it, of course. Empire Files is a 501c3 nonprofit. So that means two things for people. One of if you have deep pockets or have some money on the side, it's a tax write off if you donate to us. And so you end up not giving it to the war machine if you give it to us. But the other thing for those who don't have anything, thing, is that because we're a 501c3, you're able to add a fundraiser to your Instagram,

your YouTube channel, and other kinds of social media, because we're listed, Empire Files, Inc. is listed as, like, in their guide star, certified nonprofits. And so if you want to help raise money for the film, you can share our video and add a fundraiser to it to help that way. There's different ways to donate. If you go to earth's greatest enemy.com, there's various way of course Patreon you get exclusive stuff every month if you become a patron and behind the scenes stuff of making the movie and actually we're releasing on Patreon a lot of the uncut interviews like we interview a lot of great people for this film but documentary film you can't put long interviews in them so we got interviews that are an hour long we're going to

use one minute of them the rest of the interviews is available to watch on Patreon we've released about three of those so far which are really great and so there is uh extra benefits of Patreon, but also if you want to shoot us, you know, PayPal, a check or card, anything like that, you know, Earth's greatest enemy.com has all of that info right on the homepage. Yeah, and we'll definitely link to that website in the show notes. So listeners, if you are able to contribute, just go to the show notes. You'll be able to click on that and it'll bring you right to the link where it'll tell you how you can contribute.

So thanks a lot, Mike, Brett, why don't I turn to you first and ask you to tell the listeners how to find you and your other excellent podcasts? Sure, first things first. Thank you so much, Mike and Abby. Amazing work, so important. I highly, highly recommend anybody who has any extra money to help, fund, and donate to this project to get it up and get it in as many people's faces as humanly possible. So I can't stress that enough. As for me, everything I do is at Revolutionaryleftradio.com. You can find all my work there. Fabulous. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? People can follow me on. Twitter or X for whatever it is today at Adnan A-H-U-S-A-I-N and check out my other podcast, The M-E-L-L-I-S if you're interested in Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diasporic topics and so on. And I just want to add my thanks also to Mike and Abby for the important work that they're doing.

This is a serious investigation about the biggest issues we're facing. let's make sure we can all see this film and be educated by it as soon as possible. Yeah, absolutely. Listeners, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. The Stalin history and critique of a black legend is now available. You can go to my Twitter and find all of the information for that. And by the time this episode comes out,

it should also be listed on bookshop.org. So you should be able to, in addition to, buying it through Amazon, which, again, we're listed very high in those categories on Amazon right now, and I'd like to keep that going for the algorithm's sake. But you can also get it on bookshop.org at the time that this episode is coming out, which will, of course, benefit your local bookshop. And so just look for Iskra Books, the publisher, on bookshop.org, if that is the way that you would prefer to get the book. As for guerrilla history, you can help keep the show up been running by contributing at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla is called

G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A history. You'll get some bonus stuff there. And you can follow us on Twitter or whatever it's called by looking for at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.