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Comment by rpedela | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the economics specifically but coal, gas, oil are all subsidized too.

Some fraction of the US military expense should be attributed to obtaining energy, both explicitly (eg, patrolling shipping lanes) and implicitly (as a superpower, we can get considerations other countries don't). I don't know enough about it to hazard a guess, but I'm hoping someone, somewhere, has done an analysis.

I'm sure this is also non-zero for, say, elements required to construct solar panels, however it's almost certainly (currently) dwarfed by those for fossil fuels. That may change in the future, though.

I dislike this line of thought because it seems to imply that oil producers in the United States need to be taxed to pay for the military defense of all the overseas producers trying to put them out of business.

It is reasonable to have arguments about whether or not certain wars were fought of fossil fuels. This is not the case for any other industry I am aware of. When pressed I could not categorically refute those claims and there is at least some shady evidence pinning some of our responsibility for violence in Iraq on oil companies.

This is not a stance I personally hold or reject, but there are many with strong convictions about at least some evidence with regards to this. These people cannot easily be dismissed as tinfoil hatter.

If true the most certainly they should be accountable for the cost of military action and life lost. If false then I don't know how to prove it, proving negatives and all that.

I expect the military has.

per kwh, they are miniscule compared to solar or wind. The scale difference between ONG and Solar-Wind is huge

A large part of the U.S. military budget is implicated in fossil fuel security.

That has not been true for a while, I would actually contend, that US spends more for subsidizing defense of Europe than any Middle Eastern security.

US Shale with Canada and Mexico already made North America energy independent.

Source?

That is completely false.

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