Comment by eiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eiji | Hacker News Reader

- The US cruise business is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined.

- The US churches are a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined.

- The US Airline industry is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined.

I'm not a proponent of the bloated Military Industrial Complex, but comparisons like this are not helping any discussions. They are just click bait for people to click on and get a warm feeling thinking "That's right, screw xyz". And then they go home in an SUV, eat a meat heavy diet for dinner, run the AC on full blast, water their lawn, eat fruit from around the globe, produce a gallon of waste that wont decompose in 10k years or gets burned.

It's a political mechanism to funnel activism for one cause into activism against another cause. I believe whenever you do that, you end up hurting your own cause. If you want to advocate for fighting climate change, it's not a good tactic to alienate the military community.

One of the more genius (and nefarious) moves American industry has made is to switch the narrative on environmentalism from large organizations (corporations, the government, etc.) as polluters to individuals.[1]

Can individuals impact the environmental crisis? Sure, in aggregate. But the biggest gains come from focusing on the largest groups. They have the biggest proportional impact on the environment.

Did the steak I ate last night contribute to global warming? Sure did.

Did that steak contribute more pollution than the entire fleets of naval ships we keep deployed across the globe to 'project power'? Hardly.

Did my steak contribute more pollution than the tanks and next generation fighters the US keeps ordering and building (and which have little place in today's environment of asymmetric warfare)? Nope.

We can talk about personal responsibility and organizational responsibility for pollution at the same time. And solving the issue of organizational pollution will have a much quicker and longer-lasting effect on the environment than pushing people to stop eating so much meat.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...

Thanks for this comment! It resonated with me.

I had somewhat of existential crisis after watching "Cowspiracy" and immediately gave up all meat for a few years for what I anxiously decided was for ethical and environmental reasons.

I did it because I felt guilty, then I watched more documentaries like it and made myself feel more responsible and guilty for everything.

One day I just "woke up" and started eating some fish and chicken. It felt good, not at all because I ate animals (I don't love the ethics of this), but because I no longer felt guilty for eating food.

There are some behaviors and activities I think as individuals we should maybe feel guilty for being involved in, but I don't like the way people are made to feel guilty for just doing the basics.

Totally agree with you. I'm not a vegan. Here is what I would like people to feel guilty about to start with: Waste food in general, in particular meat. Waste water. Waste electricity. Waste gas.

If you throw out a pound of beef because you didn't get around to cooking it in time, I want people to have gut wrenching feeling in their stomach when that pound drops into your trash bin. Getting to that place will save more pollution than 100 times what the military produces.

I totally get what you are saying. But it still doesn't mean picking out a very polarizing industry, or any industry in particular, is going to help your cause.

> And solving the issue of organizational pollution will have a much quicker and longer-lasting effect on the environment than pushing people to stop eating so much meat.

You may have a quick effect, but certainly not a lasting one, or a big one. I couldn't count how many vanilla families and teenagers I know that are concerned about straws and plastic bags, but have a pool and fly on a vacation twice a year. The seat on that airplane is probably worth a millions lifetimes of "straw pollution". You could eradicate all military pollution and it would probably be a rounding error. Jack up an airline ticket prices by 250% and you'll actually see something real. Jack up gas prices in the US by 200% and you'll actually see something. Industry will happily throw anything under the bus as long as individual consumption isn't talked about.

Your comment actually strikes me as less about environmentalism and more about jealousy or some type of use of inequality as a guise for just wanting others to have less.

For example, I think it borders on possibly immoral / unethical to vaguely associate or connote that leisure airplane travel or pool ownership for generic working class people is somehow responsible for climate change and needs to be radically adjusted away from social expectations.

The reason I have no choice but to suspect an ulterior motive is that there simply is zero basis in fact to claim that certain patterns of consumption are problems like this. It’s purely a value judgment, and in this case largely disconnected from any citable statistics that expose wide impact for the class involved.

My opinion is that working class people should fly to foreign destinations for vacation if they prefer to, and making this access cheaper is an amazingly enriching and productive aspect of humanity.

It reminds me of a cliche quote from Dead Poets Society:

> Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

We shouldn’t seek to ban the pursuit of beautiful memories and experiences of travel, nor criticize that as a selfish goal. That’s ridiculous. We should acknowledge how obviously desirable it is and develop ways to do it that don’t have the negative environmental side effects.

> You could eradicate all military pollution and it would probably be a rounding error.

ahem, did you actually read even the headline?

> If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

Peru has 30 000 000 people, Portugal has 10 000 000.

US military has about 2 000 000 people. It is obviously burning much more than average people do.

> - The US X business is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined.

I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

> If you want to advocate for fighting climate change, it's not a good tactic to alienate the military community.

If you can't criticize people because that's "alienating" then we should go to Mars already, Earth is fucked.

> If you can't criticize people because that's "alienating" then we should go to Mars already, Earth is fucked.

That's how the game a is played, and we end up with grid-lock. Think what you will, but the military community is huge and is not going anywhere. It includes not just your 2 000 000 active military. Add in the veteran community and their extended family, and you get close to 50 000 000 people. Many of those will happily advocate with you for climate action. So long as you don't single them out as scape goats for your goals. Advocate for carbon tax policy etc. and make sure the Military is not exempt from it. Advocate for naval traffic pollution action, and don't exempt the military.

The percentage of pollution produced by military air- or naval- travel as a percentage of regular civilian is minuscule. For every military airplane in the sky, there are thousands of civilian airplanes. The same is true for sea and land transportation.

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