The study, led by Ryan Thombs of Penn State University and published in PLOS Climate on July 2, drew on publicly available data from the DOD spanning 1975 to 2022, linking reductions in military spending to significant decreases in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers found that a decrease in expenditures has a larger effect on slashing energy consumption than a rise in expenditures does on heightening energy usage. Additional analyses show that this is due to cuts in DOD energy consumption from facilities, vehicles and equipment, and jet fuel in particular.
“We started this study not entirely sure what we were going to find,” Thombs told Newsweek on Thursday. "There are published studies on the impacts of increasing militarization on environmental outcomes, but studying the effects of cutting military spending was an open question.
“I think the finding that cutting expenditures had a larger impact than increasing expenditures was a little bit surprising but made sense, and it is also the thing that really stood out in our analyses.”
Per capita specifically controls for population size so it’s not possible to have too many people per capita.
Large populations tend to have a lot of shared utility and a lower per capita emissions standard as a result. Countries with lots of mass transit and dense housing enjoy significant efficiences of scale. One reason why India looks so good on paper, despite having some abhorrent ecological policies in practice.
Smaller countries - especially small tourist countries - tend to have emissions far higher than their native population size would suggest. Places like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait regionally top the emissions per capita chart as a result. Canada and Russia also score badly in no small part because of how spread out the population ends up in countries with enormous amounts of wilderness.
I get what you’re saying, but the person I’m replying to specifically said that China had too many people for it to have the highest per capita amount. And that’s simply not possible, the amount of people you have has no bearing on the per capita amount of anything, as you just described, and that’s what I said.
It has too many people to avoid the economics of scale that blunt per-capita emissions rates.
As the number of people using a public service increase, the per-capita waste declines. A bus takes roughly the same amount of gasoline to move 5 people as 50. Cooling an apartment block during a heat wave is more efficient than cooling an equivalent number of stand-alone houses. And as the apartment approaches 100% occupancy, the net benefit is spread over more people. Industrial scale refrigerators consume less energy overall than individual freezers.
The more people using a piece of capital, the less energy is wasted through its continuous operation.
I already said I understood you I’m not really sure why your mansplaining this at this point, and more importantly that’s not what the person I replied to said.