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Comment by saas_co_de | Hacker News Reader

sorry, but how is the U.S. military the largest polluter in history?

Surely the billions of people using electricity and driving cars and living off of products created with fossil fuels have managed more pollution than a few million in the U.S. military?

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I think what he is saying is technically true, though the conclusion doesnt follow. It is technically true because the US Military could easily be the largest single polluting organization in the world (because it has way more employees and vehicles than any other organization). By that token, the next biggest gov't agency would probably be USPS because of the miles of driving they do. That does not mean, however, that the most effective path for stopping pollution starts there. For example, automobile fuel efficiency standards, or subsidies for solar power, etc could all offer more opportunity for reducing climate emissions than what is possible in reducing the US military usage of fossil fuels.

https://www.ecowatch.com/military-largest-polluter-240876060...

This provides absolutely no basis for comparison, jut a few slightly quantitative anecdotes. I am, without doing any research, supremely confident that US civilians and private industry are far more environmentally destructive than the US military in 2017.

"The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. Every year, our armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations—enough for over 4 million trips around the Earth, assuming 25 mpg."

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/smart-transportation-so...

Right, the single biggest maybe. But more than US citizens combined, as the parent comment indicates? No.

Right, but the US military is top down control, which means changes are easier versus herding hundreds of millions of individual consumers to the right solutions.

Nobody likes a dictatorship until something needs to get done fast.

Not only top down, but 100% accountable to the government already. No new laws necessary (under Bush, Obama, or Trump). In fact, MOST Americans want to end these useless dragging wars.

Really reveals how much they truly care about pollution versus posturing for more control.

Scary how ive been censored on here. Flagged, buried, and couldn’t answer any comment till now. I’m done with HN.

It's quite possible that the US military is a bigger polluter than any private corporation or government agency. It's an organization of truly colossal size.

But the sum of all US corporations is, in aggregate, much, much larger.

I don't know if it is true, but it's not obviously false.

Military uses huge numbers of powerful diesel engines and the US military is larger than most of the rest combined.

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