Former New Your Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges reveals that “the U.S. military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet,” burning through approximately 270,000 barrels of oil every day. That staggering consumption generates roughly 55 million tons of CO₂ emissions each year—more than the annual emissions of over 150 countries combined.

Hedges argues that this vast machinery of fossil-fuel consumption exists not to defend freedom, but to engineer coups, wage endless wars, and leave shattered nations in its wake, only to move on and repeat the cycle elsewhere.

Journalist Abby Martin joins Chris Hedges to examine how imperialism fuels America’s permanent war machine—one that claims to wage war in the name of protecting female schoolchildren while unleashing violence upon them in oil- and resource-rich nations cast as enemies.

They expose the contradictions of an empire that invokes humanitarian ideals even as it prosecutes wars of aggression in pursuit of power and resources.