Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 243 posts

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#21

Post by readme »

Roxo wrote: post #2

Surprise, surprise, the military-industrial complex is destroying our planet. How people can still support this is beyond me.

I'm sure Russia and China would love if we dialed it back a bit! Of course, then our pollution will just be displaced by theirs. Then, if we all do it, aliens will arrive and they'll pollute the planet when they destroy us. I know a lot of people think aliens would have sufficiently advanced technology, that we'd be defenseless. I'm not so sure about that. We have nuclear weapons...

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#22

Post by mc32 »

Tepix wrote: post #19
mc32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to balance that against not preventing instability around the world. What would it look like if China, Russia, Iran and many others were unchecked and we let them do whatever they wanted... Now, the current admin is cutting back on involvement. Some candidates call for more interventionism. That we’re retreating from “our duty” to be international police, essentially. So what is it?

I think you have to balance that with the tendency of military to destabilize the world.

Yes, true. But my point is sometimes we think in idealist terms where there are no negative effects to completely pulling out from international involvement.

Deterrence is good. Running roughshod like Bush and Obama resigned himself to is not good. But completely shutting it down is worse than even that.

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#23

Post by SiempreViernes »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #4

This kind of research is well documented to be funded by foreign governments. The US Military night very well pollute an extraordinary amount, but such funding will mean we never get the emissions down in other countries and this has to be a global effort. The House Committee on Natural Resources has already sent several letters [1] to groups like the National Resource Defense Council asking why they have whitepapers…

Depends on what you mean by "foreign", it's research done by UK scientists. If you want to play that card, the IPCC itself is funded by "foreign governments", so you can go right ahead and denounce all climate science as a foreign influence operation.

Honestly, I find the continued denial of the climate crisis very depressing (obviously I refer in part to your post Bucephalus355).

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#24

Post by jacquesm »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #4

This kind of research is well documented to be funded by foreign governments. The US Military night very well pollute an extraordinary amount, but such funding will mean we never get the emissions down in other countries and this has to be a global effort. The House Committee on Natural Resources has already sent several letters [1] to groups like the National Resource Defense Council asking why they have whitepapers…

> and this has to be a global effort.

I think we had an agreement in place with just that goal.

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#25

Post by cfv »

czechdeveloper wrote: post #13
antoineMoPa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirty rivers suck, but humanity's big problem right now is global warming.

Well, we face multitude of issues. For example loss of biodiversity is likely as important as global warming.

The problem is we're making the single world we can live in poisonous unstable and dead through short term unsustainable growth, violence and greed.

Maybe we can spare a few murder machines for the Imperial army until we figure out how to stop choking the planet to our collective toxic, entirely preventable deaths?

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#26

Post by SiempreViernes »

RobertoG wrote: post #15
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #4

This kind of research is well documented to be funded by foreign governments. The US Military night very well pollute an extraordinary amount, but such funding will mean we never get the emissions down in other countries and this has to be a global effort. The House Committee on Natural Resources has already sent several letters [1] to groups like the National Resource Defense Council asking why they have whitepapers…

Your post confused me. I though you were saying that this report was to be suspicious because is coming from an organization that maybe have ties to China. But it seems this report have nothing to do with that organization, but with some European universities. So, what are you saying? that the report is right but 'maybe' it was funded by another country because you don't like it?

Ultimately I doubt it matters very much to OP exactly how you interpret it, as long as you don't think about the climate crisis.

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#27

Post by ThomPete »

One thing that is always missing from these discussions is the whole picture.

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.

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.

But then again that wouldn't create as many clicks.

Somehow that underlying reality is lost on a surprising amount of people.

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.

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#28

Post by isostatic »

mc32 wrote: post #18
Roxo wrote: post #2

Surprise, surprise, the military-industrial complex is destroying our planet. How people can still support this is beyond me.

I think you have to balance that against not preventing instability around the world. What would it look like if China, Russia, Iran and many others were unchecked and we let them do whatever they wanted... Now, the current admin is cutting back on involvement. Some candidates call for more interventionism. That we’re retreating from “our duty” to be international police, essentially. So what is it?

Much of the world's instability has been caused by the US being unchecked and doing whatever it wanted

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#29

Post by maxxxxx »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #6
ecmascript wrote: post #3

I always have wondered how people calculate pollution from countries. I mean, that must be from data gathered from the government? 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. I don't really believe this article. It seems like a typical clickbait shit artic…

Dirty rivers suck, but humanity's big problem right now is global warming.

Let’s not make this a one or the other thing. Dirty rivers are at least as bad as global warming. We can’t focus on one environmental threat while forgetting all the others.

Re: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries

#30

Post by ethbro »

Tepix wrote: post #19
mc32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to balance that against not preventing instability around the world. What would it look like if China, Russia, Iran and many others were unchecked and we let them do whatever they wanted... Now, the current admin is cutting back on involvement. Some candidates call for more interventionism. That we’re retreating from “our duty” to be international police, essentially. So what is it?

I think you have to balance that with the tendency of military to destabilize the world.

War destabilizes the world. Sometimes a military causes war, sometimes it prevents it.
Post reply on HN