Via ClimateProgress: Chart: Defense Cuts in Debt Deal Are Not the Security Threat We Should Be Worrying About

Last year, the United States slipped to third in clean energy race behind China and Germany.  Many more countries spend a larger fraction of GDP on clean energy than we do — and are planning to increase that edge.  For instance, South Korea plans to spend $36 billion on renewable energy by 2015 to become a leader in this fast-growing market.

While the debt deal torpedoes U.S. energy investment for the foreseeable future, blowing up America’s ability to defend our economic, energy, environmental security, the media is focused on the impact of the cuts on the uber-bloated defense budget.

I am reposting this chart from The Economist because of overblown articles like this from USA Today:

Cuts to defense spending in the debt reduction bill could total nearly $1 trillion over 10 years — more than double what President Obama had proposed earlier this year — and sap American military might worldwide, say analysts and members of Congress….
Thomas Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Pentagon cuts won’t require “long knives so much as chain saws.”

Oh, no.  Instead of military spending that is “bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined,” we might only have a military budget that is bigger than the next 15 countries combined.


Darn you Canada and Turkey!  Of course, even that assumes those other 15 countries don’t slash their military budgets over the next decade.  Yeah, it’s a real chain saw massacre!

The bottom line is that the United States continues to run 2+ wars and be policemen to the world while conservatives insist that we must not have millionaires spend a dollar more in taxes to pay for any of that.  At the same time, the real long-term threat to US security –  global warming and peak oil — get eviscerated in the debt deal while conservatives insist we must not have uber-profitable oil companies give of one dollar of their lush subsidies.  Ah, but that is news, is it?