President Ronald Reagan jacked up the defense budget, and it worked, for the strategy bankrupted the Soviet Union, we won the Cold War, and we now have no major enemy. There is every good reason, thus, to drastically change our spending priorities. The threat of nuclear holocaust has shifted to the economy, peak oil and global warming.
Wait a minute, that was twenty years ago, and nothing has changed. Why don't we now smartly reallocate most of our defense spending to green applications? Boeing can make wind energy conversion devices, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics manufacture OTEC plantships, etc. My very first Huffington Post article suggested this plan to Barack Obama last year when he was still trying to gain the democratic nomination.
Here is one way of looking at this. The next nuclear carrier will cost $8 billion. That is about the total amount the U.S. Department of Energy spent on renewable energy R&D over the past decade. After the carrier is delivered, the lifetime operational cost could well be three to four times the capital cost, so we are now in the range of $30 billion to $40 billion. Even though aircraft carriers are strategically obsolete, for the next couple of decades, it will serve the purpose of intimidating minor enemies, so keeping the peace is worth something, I guess. Plus, very little carbon dioxide is generated.
But, say these tens of billions are utilized to stimulate the building of wind farms, solar power facilities, developing next generation transport options and the like. Clean energy will be produced, plus more and peaceful jobs will be created to better benefit humanity. Revenues will be generated, the economy will be sparked and our atmosphere cleansed. This should be a no brainer.
Unfortunately, this did not happen in 1989 and won't in 2009. Why won't our decision-makers take such an obviously sensible step? American companies can dominate the competition for defense funds. They don't need to compete against those foreigners. They have effective lobbyists. Anyone in the know has no confidence that Congress can act for the common good on these matters. This one of the glaring flaws in our political system.
The second reason is that the public likes to feel secure, and, as long as no American is being killed, it's okay, if not desirable, to have the best (and most expensive) weapons to protect our country, especially if the factories or bases are in their home state. The military industrial complex has planned wisely, for virtually every state does, indeed, benefit from this jobs machine.
That thinking should be obsolete today, but is not, for it takes time for a society to realize that we have no enemy anymore, and won't for a long time to come, if ever. There is that rag-tag bunch of terrorists, but China and Russia have their own problems, Iran is now losing money producing oil and North Korea is a joke. Further, as badly as the U.S. stock market did last year, we were still about the best in the world, dropping only 35% in value. Chinese and Russian stocks fell 70%.
Make no mistake about it, though, this recession is leaning in the direction of depression, and those trillion dollar rescue packages dwarf past government expenditures. Yes, World War II did cost something on the order of $2.5 trillion, but how many realize that the total of the Manhattan Project, Marshall Plan and Apollo Project, in 2009 dollars, is only about a quarter trillion dollars? The Bush and Obama rescue packages alone amount to five times more than what it took to build the atomic bomb to end the war, save Europe and send Men to the Moon.
That was bad enough, but the issue is, actually, larger than the country and beyond the economy. When you add the potential cost of combating Peak Oil and Global Warming, the challenge facing society becomes downright depressing, for the International Energy Agency last year reported that $45 trillion was the amount needed only to neutralize climate change. That's about forty times the Bush/Obama stimulus.
So, clearly, the challenges are monumental and solutions must be international. Forget the United Nations, for the bureaucracy is stultifying. If only one monumental agreement can be made at the next G8 summit, which will occur in July of this year in Italy, the world can begin to work together on a common solution for Planet Earth and Humanity.
What could they possibly agree on? Well, let me be brutally naive. If each country can reduce defense spending by 10% each year, with the resultant savings being applied to renewable energy and climate change, that would be a nice start. It will take time for each country to arrive at a legislated resolution, so the protocol for agreement can be signed in the 2010 Canadian Summit. By 2012, when President Barack Obama hosts the G8 gathering, the world economy should be well on the way to recovery, with oil prices tolerable, atmosphere perhaps already showing signs of healing and a globe at peace. Hey, what's wrong with a little loud dreaming? Maybe someone will take some of this seriously.