Patriots Act
Ten years ago, Robin Eckstein was a college student in Appleton, Wisconsin, struggling to pay her bills with bartending and waitressing jobs. Her credit card debt was mounting. Out of the blue, a National Guard recruiter e-mailed her, offering a free college education in exchange for her military service. She enlisted, and reported for active duty in October 2000. Three years later, she was driving supply trucks across the Iraqi desert. Eckstein, 33, has been out of the U.S. Army for three years now, but on this frigid Tuesday morning in late March, she finds herself pulling transport duty once more, this time driving a big, blue biodiesel-fueled bus across the state of Ohio, from Columbus to Cincinnati. She is ferrying veterans like herself: Matt Victoriano, an ex-Marine; Rafael Noboa Rivera, a former Army sergeant; and Nick Anderson, a former Army specialist. The foursome is making its way through the Midwest as part of Operation Free, a campaign to promote clean energy organized by a progressive leadership institute called the Truman National Security Project. Operation Free, now in its second year, includes dozens of vets who have logged more than 25,000 miles traveling across 23 states, stopping at union halls, factories, statehouses, and radio stations and making appearances on nightly news programs. At each stop the veterans get off the bus and share their stories, eyewitness accounts of the ways in which America’s dependence on oil affects not only which wars we fight but also our ability to wage war. In their own words, the vets say what many people have said before: America must become energy-independent, invest in renewables, and commit to a future that eradicates the threat of climate change — not because it’s the feel-good thing to do but because this nation’s security may depend on it. These vets’ views have become increasingly mainstream, even among national defense experts. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under President Clinton, is outspoken about the connection between the dollars the United States pays to satisfy its oil addiction and the ordnance lobbed at our troops. "Except for our own Civil War, this is the only war that we have fought where we are paying for both sides," Woolsey has said. "We are paying for these terrorists with our SUVs." And in late April, 33 retired generals and admirals signed an open letter to the leaders of the Senate, stating that "America’s billion-dollar-a-day dependence on oil makes us vulnerable to unstable and unfriendly regimes." They called on President Obama and Congress to "enact strong, comprehensive climate and energy legislation to reduce carbon pollution and lead the world in clean energy technology." Robin Eckstein is tall and blond, stylish in her black suit. As she drives the bus down I-71, she tells me in her flat Wisconsin accent what a typical day in Iraq was like. As an Army specialist, a notch higher in rank than private first class, she rolled out of camp every morning in a slow-moving convoy of trucks carrying water and fuel to troops dispersed throughout the desert. Exposed to harsh weather and frequent sniper fire, her detail was one of the most dangerous in the service. "We were the weakest link," she says. "If one of us gets taken out, you don’t know how far the dominoes are going to fall." Without fuel to power up their Humvees, helicopters, and tanks, troops can do little other than sit and wait. Even now, she says, she cannot help but think of thirsty soldiers waiting for fuel in the middle of the desert. Off the bus, several days and several states later, I meet with Aaron Scheinberg, who tells a similar tale in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the Harvard campus, where the 29-year-old former Army captain is a graduate student. "There were times in Iraq when we couldn’t go anywhere," Scheinberg says. "We couldn’t have medical helicopters escort us because we ran out of fuel. Other times soldiers were killed bringing fuel to our base." Just starting a tank’s engine — from a cold start to the moment you’re ready to roll — consumes seven gallons of fuel. Running at a top speed of about 45 miles an hour, the average Abrams tank gets a paltry 0.6 mile to the gallon, he explains. Scheinberg is the New Jersey coordinator for Operation Free, and when he’s not taking classes at the Kennedy School of Government, he’s driving to his home state, volunteering his time and energy to speak at events much like those Eckstein and her crew attend. Scheinberg is one of a half dozen veterans on campus who take time away from their coursework in business, government, and international relations to talk with the media and the public about their shared conviction that clean energy goes hand in hand with the United States’ ability to maintain its competitive edge in the world. Drew Sloan, 30, is in his second year at Harvard Business School, and when we meet up near campus, I notice a faint scar on his right cheek. In 2004, when he was serving in Afghanistan, he was part of a two-vehicle convoy zipping along a riverbed when his Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Sloan woke up four days later in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recalling nothing of the attack that blew in his vehicle’s windshield and shattered most of the bones in his face. In October of that year, he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He then turned down a medical discharge to go to Iraq, where he earned a second Bronze Star. In late 2009, Operation Free asked Sloan to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In his written testimony and in person, he argued that climate change and its attendant extreme weather events would only exacerbate geopolitical instability. As sea level rises, he said, millions of people who live in coastal nations such as Bangladesh may have to flee across borders and become climate refugees. If that happens, who would quell the unrest? "The U.S. military is the only institution that can take on a massive humanitarian crisis," Sloan tells me. "Whenever anyone attacks the science of climate change, they ridicule the data as being uncertain," Sloan says. "Veterans know you can’t wait for 100 percent certainty. If you wait until everything is clear and laid out, you’re probably no longer alive. Or if you are still alive, you’ve definitely lost because someone else has seized the advantage. Veterans know how to deal with ambiguity and still make decisions." His testimony hews closely to the U.S. military’s own recently adopted positions on climate change. In the February 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a summary of Department of Defense strategies and priorities, the department discussed climate change for the first time in the report’s history. "Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world," reads the document, "contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments." In an effort to reduce its own carbon emissions, Defense Department officials laid out a series of goals that might surprise most Americans. For example, the Air Force will increase its alternative fuel load to 50 percent by 2016; the Army is converting nontactical vehicles to hybrids and electrics stateside; and the Navy is exploring biofuels for its carriers. The last night I’m with the bus in Cincinnati, Noboa, Anderson, and Eckstein are talking to a group of about 100 people gathered at a labor hall for a green energy and jobs rally. Some people wear hard hats that read, "2 million green energy jobs now!" Others sport T-shirts that say, "Make our energy clean. Make it American." The vets have been on the road since 6:00 a.m. They held a morning press conference, shook dozens of hands, briefed aides to Ohio governor Ted Strickland, and spent a few harried hours trying to fix a broken brake light along the way. Eckstein is exhausted when she steps up to the podium, but somehow manages to draw on the crowd’s energy. She speaks with conviction as she recalls details from the QDR, telling the crowd that the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency are serious about taking action. "These are not organizations known for hugging polar bears," she says. The line gets a laugh from the crowd, but a bearded man in his fifties isn’t buying it. He finds it laughable to extol the green leadership of the U.S. military. The military is creating a human and environmental disaster in Iraq, he says. He advocates dismantling the armed forces and using that money to rehabilitate the Midwest’s factories and invest in projects that promote a "humane" green economy. "The military is not a leader," he says. "The military is the obstacle!" For a moment, it looks as if the riders of the big, blue bus have crashed headlong into the idealism of the old left. But Eckstein responds respectfully. "Thank you for your passion," she says. "It’s not that I don’t care about the human toll, because — trust me — I do, and I know my fellow veterans do. But if this is the approach we have to take so that certain other individuals will get it, is it not a good approach? Certain individuals, when they hear the words ‘climate change,’ they shut down. For whatever reason, when they hear veterans speak on it, they actually listen," she says. "They get it, they understand it, and they’re willing to change. That’s what we want. We all want change." She is taken aback by the applause, and blushes as she takes the next question. Later, as the hall empties out, the man who challenged her is among the first to approach Eckstein to shake her hand. After the crowd disperses, Eckstein and the other vets troop back out to the bus. Tomorrow they will hit the road again. When they get to the next stop — Pittsburgh — they’ll try to help people see, once more, what they have seen. Joseph D’Agnese is coauthor of Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence (Quirk).
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Patriots Act
The Synthesist
Bit by digital bit, and with hardly a thought, I am ascending into the cloud. You likely are too. The cloud — sometimes called the Cloud, or even just "cloud," sans article — is the computing reality we’re all hurtling toward and to a great extent already inhabiting. The cloud is best defined by what it isn’t: a hard drive in your laptop or under your desk, or in a closet at your school or office. Once we filled these hard drives with downloaded songs, digital photos, and moth-eaten e-mails. Now we stream our media (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Vudu; Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker), post our pics (Picasa, Flickr), store our files online, use Web-based e-mail, share Google Docs, and exchange Facebook pokes. We are uploading, outsourcing. And so is big business: companies, universities, entire city governments are forsaking their costly private data centers to instead rent virtual space from "cloud providers" like Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and Google to e-mail, archive, and collaborate. Within 10 years, according to one estimate, 80 percent of all computing and data storage worldwide will transpire in the cloud. Naturally, the collective cloud still lives somewhere — in vast "server farms" in North Carolina, Washington, Oregon, all over. And its emergence raises a number of real-world issues like, oh, the integrity and security of all that data. What the cloud does promise, however, is improved energy efficiency, such that info-tech wonks are tripping over themselves to declare cloud computing the "green computing option." By migrating to the cloud, it seems, I do old Earth a favor. Maybe, sort of. Existing data centers are notoriously inefficient. Mostly they rev their engines, waiting for rare periods of peak demand — and operating at less than 15 percent of their maximum capacity. In 2006 U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of energy; figure about 80 percent of that energy — enough to fuel six million homes for a year — was spent running processors that processed absolutely nothing. Cloud-computing centers, in contrast, use "virtualization" software to simulate many more computers than actually exist. These virtual machines can be conjured or dispelled to match demand, so the actual machines can run closer to their full capacity. In theory, that saves energy. There isn’t yet a standard way, though, to measure how much better optimized cloud servers are than old-fashioned data centers. As data centers consolidate, their owners face pressure to lower energy costs. Roughly half the electricity that enters a cloud center goes toward cooling it, and several of the cloud giants are building new facilities designed to reduce that drain. Recently the island of Mauritius proposed plans to develop a cloud center cooled by seawater. Meanwhile, pundits are buzzing about a "follow the moon" strategy, in which server loads might be shuffled from place to place, across latitudes and time zones, to take advantage of cooler temperatures or cheaper power. Of course, not all power is green power, moonlit though it may be. No sooner did Facebook advertise the virtues of the impressive new cloud facility it plans to build in Oregon than Greenpeace started a Facebook group called "Stop Facebook from Switching to Dirty Coal," noting that Facebook’s intended energy supplier, Pacific Power, generates most of its electricity from coal. Of course, electric cars use coal too, if indirectly, and they’re very green. The real issue is that the cloud is growing. It is more energy-efficient than what it’s replacing, but it isn’t using less energy overall. Data centers in the United States currently devour an amount of energy equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world’s total electricity consumption, and that share is rising. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, calls this "the paradox of abundance": the more efficiently the cloud uses electricity, the more of it we consume with our ever-expanding arsenal of always-on smart phones, tablets, and other gadgets. That the cloud seems free to use — Georgetown University analyst Michael Nelson has called Gmail "the entry drug of cloud users" — only obscures its magnificent, and climbing, cost. I like the cloud; it’s comfy, it’s handy. (This article was largely written on it.) But it’s like my membership at Costco: it makes me green the same way "Buy More, Save More" saves me money. Sure, we save energy by computing in bulk — but only if we had planned on computing that much anyway. Some say the cloud will pay for itself, by automatically turning off our lights at night, maybe, or making CDs obsolete. I’m less sure. One study predicts that by the year 2015, the amount of data we exchange on the Internet will have increased tenfold, most of it in the form of videos. It troubles me to think that a tropical island nation is investing in my desire to stream old episodes of Lost . I wonder: when I become one with the cloud, will I still remember what a real one looks like?
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The Synthesist