US military is terrified of climate change – but is the world's biggest polluter | Hacker News Reader

US military is terrified of climate change – but is the world's biggest polluter

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43 pointsajhaupt722 comments

The DoD is the world's largest employer. Unsurprisingly, they are the largest polluter. That doesn't make them hypocrites automatically.

I fail to see a causal relationship between employment and carbon emissions?

How do you fail to see that?

More employees = More buildings, More work, More everything, etc.

"I fail to see a casual relation between city size and carbon emissions. Why does New York City have higher emissions than McMullen, Alabama?"

I mean the causation could very well be reverse (more building require more employees etc.)

It could also be from a third factor (population growth demands more work and more infrastructure which leads to more carbon emissions).

I’m not denying the correlation as it exists today (bigger employers probably emit more carbon into the atmosphere; or at least intuitively; I haven’t looked at the data), but that correlation is by no means neither necessary (you could theoretically employ a lot of people without having any carbon emissions) nor sufficient (you can be a very large polluter with only robots doing all the work; like a big automatic aluminum smelter).

I've recently seen an interesting documentary [1] about then-senator Al Gore asking the CIA to study the vast satellite image archives to figure out what was going on with the arctic. They half-heartedly started a project but it really only took off when Bill clinton became president and Al Gore vice president. They'd invited scientists of all disciplines to the CIA, gave them clearances in an accelerated process and gave them access to the images. They even went to russia to study their reports of the arctic. With Bush, the project was cancelled until Obama revived it and even established a dedicated office [2].

[1]: https://sales.arte.tv/fiche/ESPIONS_POUR_LA_PLANETE

[2]: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statemen...

From 2 above:

"Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources."

China contains 14 of the top 30 most polluted cities on the planet. China is constructing new coal power plants, while the united states closes down more coal plants every year. There's a weird thing going on in the news where real polluters like china get a free pass to destroy the earth and the environment and light polluters like the united states are harshly criticized for running operations in a more environmentally friendly manner.

When the aliens want to destroy a planet they give them capitalism, science, and technology. The people do rest of the work. Because power corrupts. The greater the power the worse the eventual catastrophe.

Going to need a source for that.

We do have a sample size of one. We’ve tried global capitalism once, and combined with a global industrial revolution we’ve so far increased the global average temperature by a whole degree celsius[1].

1: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Ah, that's good. We've got a bit of leeway before we reach boiling point.

Indeed. While the industrial revolution is kind of irreversible, global capitalism isn’t. Logic dictates we use this leeway to reverse global capitalism.

I kinda figured we'd find a cure for cancer so that we could survive the cancer-causing air-particulate matter from hot climate change.

The headline is misleading, since it suggests that the military is scared of someone else, when in fact they are the biggest polluter.

No, the headline says they are scared of climate change (which is not a "someone", but a collection of serious consequences) and then includes the irony that they are contributing to that very threat as a big polluter.

You may have seen the updated headline, which is much clearer.

Very possible - I didn't realize it had been changed. My apologies.

I read it the same way: The military is scared of climate change and of the world’s biggest polluter.

OP here -- I can see how that could be read incorrectly. Updated for clarity

Thanks, that's much better.

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