I always liked this Clickhole piece on military/environmental issues:<p>5 Ways ISIS Can Reduce Its Carbon Footprint<p>"As ISIS continues to expand its operations in the Middle East, it is more urgent than ever for this group to enact sustainable policies that will have the least impact on our environment. Here are some expert tips to help the Islamic State go green!<p>Requiring cars to stop at a military checkpoint leads to fuel inefficiency and idling engines, especially if an ISIS agent has to search the vehicle. Limiting checkpoints to one every 20 miles provides similar security with significantly lower emissions!"<p><a href="https://news.clickhole.com/5-ways-isis-can-reduce-its-carbon-footprint-1825123209" rel="nofollow">https://news.clickhole.com/5-ways-isis-can-reduce-its-carbon...</a>
US Military is a bigger <i>insert topic here</i> than as many as <i>insert large number here</i> countries. Whether that topic is economics, or employees, or technology, or any other metric you want to analyze...the US military is large.<p>Edit: It would be more interesting to compare pollution from the military vs other countries or other militaries as a function of their size. Similar problems often arise when comparing states - it's unsurprising when California is the largest and Wyoming is the smallest; please normalize your data! For example, the US military budget of ~$650B is comparable to the GDP of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, or alternatively comparable to the GDP of the ~80 smallest countries. That 80 country GDP vs 140 country pollution difference is already more illuminating to me...
This could be a poster child for how you can be telling the truth, but obviously are biased.<p>Wikipedia lists 186 countries GDP [1]. The 46th (186-46=140) listed country is Romania, with a GDP of $239 billion. In 2018, the U.S defense budget was just under $700 billion. Spending more money, and especially on a Navy at that, will obviously lead to more pollution.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...</a>
I always have wondered how people calculate pollution from countries. I mean, that must be from data gathered from the government?<p>For countries/governments that doesn't even have or have a very limited garbage disposal, that must mean they pollute very little on paper when in reality people just throw stuff into the ground / ocean etc.<p>I don't really believe this article. It seems like a typical clickbait shit article actually. Pollution is not only how much CO2 you release into the air, just look at some rivers in India which are incredibly polluted or countries in Africa where people simply burn metal in hunt for rare metals which they can sell. That pollution is probably not included in this statistic which makes me call bullshit on this claim.
I think it's worth noting that many of the vehicles, ships, airplanes used now by the US military were designed in the 80s, and the last thing on the mind of the engineers were carbon emissions. Hopefully, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman etc. start thinking about this stuff in the future.<p>Interestingly at one point, the US Navy wanted to go all nuclear. That would have helped carbon emissions. <a href="https://www.wearethemighty.com/gear-tech/navy-nuclear-power-cruiser-destroyer?rebelltitem=4#rebelltitem4" rel="nofollow">https://www.wearethemighty.com/gear-tech/navy-nuclear-power-...</a>
This isn’t surprising. The US military has 1.3 million people that are engaging in a lot of transportation.<p>If we look at list of countries by population, 140 countries have less that 10m people (90 have more than 10 million). So on a per capita basis, the US pollutes maybe 7x as much per capita but again, because the military is using so much transportation it’s not surprising. I would bet CEOs have a bigger per capita carbon footprint.
Yeah, and still the fact is that if US GHG emissions drop to 0, it won't do much for global warming. It was good that Biden brought up in last night's debate that the US produces 15% of global GHG emissions. Which is disproportionate to their population, but also small enough that unilateral actions by the US will not solve the problem.
Wow, this thread makes me want to delete my account. People of the US are way too scary for my liking, makes me never want to land in your country. For me, if US doesnt stop playing the world cop position the worse this world will get.
How about the USA rather starts a military intervention in whichever country is destroying the environment the most. Fighting for a habitable planet for all mankind sounds like a better idea than fighting for oil, no?
Our military (US) and military budget is just another cold war era echo which has been propagating for far too long. There are so many alarmist media outlets in this country who 'make their steak' off of fear mongering (looking at you FOX news) and what's more unfortunate is the general public's seeming endless supply of naive assent too their ideals and tactics.<p>It isn't the US governments fault the military industrial complex is so large, it's ours. So long as we continue to sheepishly abide by the ignorant notion that our public officials are moral actors whose ambitions and initiatives are driven and monitored by their superb ethical standards we are doomed.<p>We have to hold the women and men in office accountable not only for their actions but for our agenda. We have to stop living under the yoke of fear and distraction pumped out by the media machine. We have to be brave and fight back or else, when the shit hits the fan, we can only blame ourselves.
One thing that is always missing from these discussions is the whole picture.<p>You have to factor the pros and the cons in any situation. This kind of headlines and focus only focuses on the negatives with regards but forget to ask why we have a military, to begin with and what the cost would be if we didn't.<p>A much healthier approach IMO is to look at how we can improve energy production in general as that's at the heart of things here. And once we look at that we will quickly realize that we are already looking at that but finding out it's not as easy to improve the way we currently use energy as people might want it to be.<p>But then again that wouldn't create as many clicks.<p>Somehow that underlying reality is lost on a surprising amount of people.<p>Our relatively wealthy, safe, modern lives with all the bells and whistles and freedoms we in the west take for granted, only is possible because it ultimately sits on top of military dominance that allows us to secure acccess to the proper resources and gives us negotiation power.