Former HuffPo contributor Barry Sanders is at it again. Last month Sanders wrote a horribly misinformed article for the Huffington Post on "the military's addiction to oil." The piece was riddled with factual errors, and when the WWS and others pointed a few out, Arianna threw the guy under the bus with an editor's note canceling the series and saying of Sanders's defense, "it confuses as much as it clarifies."
At the time Sanders apologized for his failure "to reach an absolutely authoritative [read factually accurate] version of this essay" by explaining that he was "not a mathematician, not a military person, not a trained climatologist." Yet despite that epiphany, he's still at it, peddling bogus statistics about the fuel consumption of the U.S. military. But this time it's worse. Now he's feeding the same bad numbers that got him dumped from HuffPo to journalism students. Mollie McWilliams, a staff writer for the Golden Gate [X] Press, a publication run by the San Francisco State University Journalism Department, has interviewed Sanders for a piece called "Pollution and war meet in the Green Zone." She writes:
The idea for the essay came on a lark, Sanders said, who thought to himself one morning, the use of war vehicles, bombs and ammunition in guns must leave behind erasable traces of radioactive material on the ground and release chemicals into the air. Afterwards, he decided that war, as polluter, needed to be researched and presented to the public.
"I want there to be clamp put on America's greatest polluter-the American military," Sanders said.
What he found was the U.S. military used 40 million gallons of oil in the first three weeks of combat, more than what the Allied Forces used during all four years of WWI and about 80 times the amount spilled in the San Francisco Bay. Sanders said he also discovered that bombs, like the 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter," contain high amounts of uranium.
I don't know how Ms. McWilliams, after noting concerns about "some number inconsistencies" in his work for HuffPo, failed to check this one. In 2004, the U.S. military consumed 144 million barrels of oil. And in 2005 the military did use about 1.7 million gallons of fuel a day in Iraq--so maybe Sanders isn't too far off the mark for the first three weeks of the invasion in 2003. But he's way off on the recent spill in San Francisco Bay--it was not 500,000 gallons of oil, it was 58,000 gallons--so he's off by just a factor of ten. The ship in question, the Cosco Busan, could hold 1 million gallons of oil, but to put that in perspective, the Exxon Valdez spilled roughly 11 million gallons of fuel into Prince William Sound. The Valdez was carrying 53 million gallons of oil when it hit the reef. So Sanders seems to be saying that in the First World War--a war in which the allies "floated to victory on a wave of oil" as Lord Curzon famously remarked--the entire alliance consumed significantly less oil than we now transport in a single supertanker.
As to the Daisy Cutter and other "bombs" containing high amounts of uranium, it's absurd, but I'm not surprised a student at SFSU would believe the U.S government was lacing American munitions with "erasable" radioactive material. Still, if the San Francisco State University Journalism Department knows how to print a correction, this feels like a teachable moment.
