U.S. Military emits more greenhouse gases than Portugal, study finds | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Military emits more greenhouse gases than Portugal, study finds

reuters.com

Not that this means anything, but I was curious about the relative sizes just in terms of people:

Portugal population: 10.3 million

US Military: 1.3 million active duty + 800,000 reserve

Also don't forget civilian employees and contractors.

Were they included in the calculations for emissions? I guess that would become very complicated, because you'll need to include their homes, parts of the stores around them etc, and it gets very muddy very quickly.

Or you can look it by spending: ~$700 BILLION a year and obviously it involves moving and sailing around. Portugal's entire GDP is around $240 Billion (not budget, GDP)

So they actually get quite limited bang for buck. Or are pretty low CO2 intensive compared to a regular economy with people in it. Or manage to spend a lot on contractors that are not adequately accounted for, or ... A global carbon tax accounted for at a company level would alleviate this problem of comparisons. And is unfeasible (alas).

contractors is my guess. Most of that $700B goes to arms manufacturers and providers.

Either our current conception of the nation state changes, or civilization dies violently.

Meanwhile, the New York Times front page is filled with discussion of Iran and not a thing about climate collapse.

> Either our current conception of the nation state changes, or civilization dies violently.

This doesn't seem like an either/or to me. IMHO the most likely outcome is that our conception of the nation state will change just as civilization dies violently. Same event - just as the nation state was born out of war, it'll die in war.

This doesn't necessarily mean that all of humanity is going to die. Rather our conception of what it means to be "civilized" - which for most people is synonymous with "developed nation" - will die, and there will be new social organizing principles with new dominant technologies.

is it against the rules to ask why was this flagged? It's a Reuters story, based on a Brown University study and about a topic this community is interested. Ideally everyone should be interested but that's a different story

Does Portugal have a military?

The title is a bit skewed, should of course be US defense for us who don't view the Pentagon building as representative of the whole DOD.

But the message, if true, is very poignant. I'm of course part of the choir as green liberal anti war but this affects us all.

I changed the title, if the mods let it be. In the original story it was Pentagon and can confusing.

(Even if you filled the Pentagon with cows, I doubt it would surpass Sweden and Portugal's greenhouse gases :) )

Yeah, inaccurate and clickbaity headline.

It's the key finding of the study, I don't see how it's clickbait (surely the opposite, it's telling you upfront what the topic and answer is rather than "you won't believe who ...").

Do you have something more substantial than "inaccurate" as a critique of the study?

The clickbait part is saying "the Pentagon" when they mean "the US military." A casual reader may assume the headquarters building alone produces that much gas, which is obviously false.

Of course the excuse is that "the Pentagon" is often used as a metonym for the Department of Defense. But that means the leadership specifically. You might say "the Pentagon ordered fifty F-35s," but never "the Pentagon invaded Afghanistan." It's a really awkward phrasing at best, and I can't imagine that it's not deliberately deceptive. Are the facts not shocking enough?

For later readers, this comment means the original headline: "U.S. Pentagon emits more greenhouse gases than Portugal, study finds."

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