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Each F-35 burns 22 gallons of jet fuel per minute, 1,340 gallons an hour. Altogether, the F-35A training flights from the runway in South Burlington Vermont burn between 4.7 and 9.4 million gallons of jet fuel and emit between 100 million and 200 million pounds of CO2 per year. That is the equivalent of the annual emissions of 10,000 to 20,000 passenger cars. Scroll down to the footnote to see details of the calculation.

The Pentagon admits that global warming is a national security threat. Yet, the US military is the single largest user of fossil fuels on the planet, as described in the Brown University, Watson Institute study, “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War.” The study reports that the US military is also the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the Department of Defense burns 80% of all US government energy consumption. It also reports that jet fuel—the fuel used by the F-35—is, by far, the single largest category of energy consumed by the US government and by the Defense Department.

The US House recently authorized spending $768 billion in 2022 for more wars. Including 85 more F-35 jets. The $1.4 trillion F-35 program is the poster child of that deeply flawed pro-war policy.

As described in the Watson Institute report, “Job Opportunity Cost of War,”

By spending money on the military and homeland security, we lose the opportunity to spend those funds on other things like education, healthcare, infrastructure, or clean energy. By forfeiting those opportunities, we lose the chance to fund programs that create even more jobs than military spending.

Since 2001, because the federal government has spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan, we have lost opportunities to create millions of jobs in the domestic economy, and we have lost opportunities to improve educational, health, and environmental outcomes for the American public. . . While defense spending is indeed a source of job creation, these other areas create many more jobs for any given level of spending. Education and healthcare create more than twice as many jobs as defense for the same level of spending, while clean energy and infrastructure create over 40 percent more jobs. In fact, over the past 16 years, by spending money on war rather than in these other areas of the domestic economy, the US lost the opportunity to create between one million and three million additional jobs.

This means that, when considered against spending the money on efficiency, renewables, health care, education, and infrastructure, instead spending it on the F-35 is causing a loss in jobs. While massively accelerating climate change.

Nor can the F-35 protect Vermont from a warming climate, mega storms, pandemics, racism, job loss, cyber-attacks, nuclear missiles, terrorism, food insecurity, or income inequality.

The F-35 cannot protect people or planet from sea level rise, famine, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, wildfires, temperature extremes, diminished access to fresh water, and deforestation.

The F-35 cannot prevent mass migration and wars caused by climate change.

The F-35 does not abolish the fossil fuel industry. Instead, the F-35 actively promotes expansion of the fossil fuel industry: The F-35 is a climate killer.

Nor can the F-35 protect black, brown, indigenous, women, LGBTQ, immigrants, refugees, or veterans.

The F-35 program drains $1.4 trillion from health care, education, affordable housing, infrastructure, and preventing more global pandemics. As military spending creates far fewer jobs per billion dollars spent than money spent on any of those things, the F-35 is a jobs killer.

The F-35 does not take on the billionaire class.

The F-35 does not raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour or facilitate organizing workers into unions.

The F-35 does not take on white nationalists.

The F-35 does not drive money out of politics.

The F-35 does not abolish voter suppression.

The F-35 does not abolish tuition and student debt.

When used for training from a runway in cities, as in Vermont, the extreme 115-decibel noise of the F-35 is a non-lethal weapon of mass destruction: damaging hearing, impairing learning and cognitive development, damaging hearts and causing strokes, and making 2,963 affordable Vermont homes uninhabitable.

The F-35 benefits a fraction of the 1% in Vermont. The ones who sell jet fuel and seek to develop the now-vacant 40 acres adjacent the airport where 200 affordable homes once stood, but were demolished because of the extreme noise of the military jets.

The F-35 upended Vermont town meeting democracy, a government accountable to the people, and the rule of law. It is corruption on steroids.

Fortunately, Vermont has the power to halt the F-35 training. No authorization from Washington is needed: The US constitution reserves to the states the authority of training their state national guard units.

The F-35 can be stopped. If an aroused public forced Vermont political and military leaders to use that constitutional authority to halt F-35 training flights, the state would significantly decrease its own greenhouse gas emissions and set an example for other states. Vermont would lead the way to reducing the largest US government driver of climate catastrophe: the military. And the state would do its part to prevent the future wars.

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