This is old news - certainly older than Jon telling you earlier this month about the Army going green - but the United States Military is the number one purchaser and user of oil in the world. The. Whole. Wide. World.

In fact, NPR told us last year (I told you it was old) that based on the military’s 340,000 barrels of oil it goes through a day,

If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.

Let’s do the math, roughly. When oil was at the peak prices of about $150 a barrel…multiply that by 340,000 a day…that is (get ready for it) $18,615,000,000 a year on oil. Now that oil is back down to about $50 a barrel, though, it’s only…let’s see…$6,205,000,000. Six billion dollars a year on gas, alone, for the United States Military. To put that into perspective, with that much money, I could buy enough copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller to listen to each copy just once, back to back, every minute of every day, for the next 43,586 years. Why Thriller? Cause it’s awesome.

So you can see how some sort (any sort!) of sustainability plan like Jon talked about would be a great start. Or, we could just, I don’t know. Stop fighting wars (oops…politics just got involved). takepart to visit the Obama-Biden transition site to see what they’re working on to end said wars and bring the cost of the military back into check.