DES MOINES — Hillary Clinton was Zen-like about nemesis Donald Trump on Monday, shrugging off a question about one of the Republican presidential front-runner's attacks on her by implying that some of what he says is divorced from reality.

"I've adopted a New Year's resolution," Clinton said at a question-and-answer session with voters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

"I'm going to let him live in his alternate reality," she said. "I'm not going to respond."

Clinton had been asked to respond to what the questioner said was Trump's charge that Clinton and President Obama had "created" the Islamic State militant group through their actions in the Middle East.
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By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy ... Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements ... Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders.

It's a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report " A Climate of War."

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Correspondingly, militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster, bigger, more fuel-guzzling planes, tanks and naval vessels employed in more intensive air and ground wars. At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army's armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.(2)

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Only recently has the momentous issue of military fuel use and its massive, yet concealed role in global climate change come to the foreground, thanks to a handful of perspicacious researchers. Liska and Perrin contend that, in addition to tailpipe emissions, immense "hidden" greenhouse gas pollution stems from our use of gasoline. This impact on climate change should be calculated into the full lifecycle analysis of gasoline. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compares gasoline and biofuels for their respective atmospheric pollution, the greenhouse gas emissions calculated for gasoline should include the military activities related to securing foreign crude oil, from which gasoline is derived. (But they do not, thanks to the Kyoto Accords military exemption.) Oil security comprises both military protection against sabotage to pipelines and tankers and also US-led wars in oil-rich regions to assure long-term access. Nearly 1,000 US military bases trace an arc from the Andes to North Africa across the Middle East to Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea, sweeping over all major oil resources - all related, in part, to projecting force for the sake of energy security. Further, the "upstream emissions" of greenhouse gases from the manufacture of military equipment, infrastructure, vehicles and munitions used in oil supply protection and oil-driven wars should also be included in the overall environmental impact of using gasoline. Adding these factors into their calculations, the authors conclude that about "20 percent of the conventional DoD budget ... is attributable to the objective of oil security."

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Military operations are major industrial activities that use massive amounts of fuel and materials that significantly contribute to climate change. In this article, we assert that military activity to protect international oil trade is a direct production component for importing foreign oil—as necessary for imports as are pipelines and supertankers—and therefore the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from that military activity are relevant to U.S. fuel policies related to climate change. Military security for protection of global maritime petroleum distribution is part of the acquisition process, but in addition, recent Middle Eastern wars may also be related to securing petroleum reserves.

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The elimination of Middle East oil imports would allow cessation of military oil security activity, equivalent to a 20-percent reduction in conventional U.S. military activity and emissions, which in turn is equivalent to 17.5 g CO2e per MJ of gasoline energy now imported from the Middle East (Table 3). If this consequence is a plausible and reasonable prediction, regulatory authorities should include these indirect military emissions as they compare the GHG consequences of substituting biofuels for gasoline from the Persian Gulf.