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by sdinsn 2558 days ago
The DoD is the world's largest employer. Unsurprisingly, they are the largest polluter. That doesn't make them hypocrites automatically.
1 comments

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).