Hacker News Reader

Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if any country would take a stand and sanction the USA for "not doing their fair share to save the world". Like imposing a climate tax on US imports.. That'd be interesting.

View on HN

Another avenue would be emissions / environmental impact limits on various categories of goods. This would incentivize US business to go around the Trump administration's back and do the right thing anyways, just so they can continue to have access to these markets.

In any event, any effective global approach to these issues will need to have some legal and/or economic force, so the US is really just shooting itself in the foot by bucking the trend. Maybe we'll have a couple hundred more coal jobs nationwide to show for it, though :s

Don't we, USA, already have some of the toughest climate laws in the world?

you refer to for instance those US Postal service LLV's that do 10 miles to the gallon (converts to 4.3 km per liter)?

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3xqc4m/til_t...

There isn't any legally binding cap on on climate emissions in the U.S.

There are some energy efficiency laws, but aside from that we don't really have any climate laws at all.

In the land of the blind...

Perhaps we should be taking a stand and boycotting goods from China?

According to this source, China has double the emissions of USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

If looked at on a per capita basis, Australia and quite a few other countries are worse than USA.

> China has double the emissions of USA:

No idea why my sibling commenter deanCommie was killed, but his point seems good to me: according to your own source USA's per capita emissions are more than twice as high as China's.

China is cutting out coal even turning back ships from North Korea mid shipment.

And China is said to be spending $360 billion over the next three years implementing more green power sources. But has already installed a lot of solar and wind. In fact "one new wind turbine per hour in 2015" according to Greenpeace.

That would be interesting indeed. Isn't a large part of the emissions generated by China the result of producing stuff ordered/purchased by the USA?

I hope people just stop buying american products instead. That will have greater effect, both economically and politically.

Well, the first step would be to boycott this forum which is hosted in the US.

You first?

That probably wouldn't result in any noticeable damage at all. Boycotting goods and paid services has a larger direct impact and I'm all for it.

So where do you propose to start? Who's going to step up to the plate and do it?

Honestly I wouldn't know. How do movements like this get started?

I wonder how the energy usage spreads. Routers, Cloudflare caches, broadband providers, wifi modem, laptop, browser.

Thats what I would like to see done and seems like the most appropriate way to deal with it.

Yeah. They could say that this is to counter the price advantage that the US exports get by pulling out of environmental obligations. Not sure how this would play with the WTO. Plus it probably won't happen anyways.

It won't happen. The diplomatic way is to not escalate things and just ignore the elephant in the room until it disappears. 3,5 years is not that long.

I don't hope so. It would give Trump ammunition for his next campaign. "The rest of the world is treating us very unfairly".

Also, how will the rest of the world know if the US is doing their fair share if the US stops sharing data?

Ammunition of the sort you're talking about doesn't really matter when they're willing to just lie.

If you have seen how they push lies, you should see how they push narratives that are half true.

Gee, I remember the last time a country thought it was being treated unfairly. That ended well.

And what would a "stand" look like, exactly? A "climate tariff" kind of made me laugh, as the repercussions of doing that would not be pretty.

Trump tells NATO members to pay "fair share"...

A proper "stand" could look like a BIG NO to an increase in NATO spending. Investing in a European military alliance is sufficient for the matters we are facing.

> The US is no longer a reliable ally and Europe's destiny is 'in our own hands'.

Less pretty than the consequences of climate change?

Interesting (and perhaps emotionally satisfying), yes. Productive, no. Imposing tariffs is akin to shooting yourself in the foot if what you really want is innovation in clean energy.

What authority would tax the US? And why would the US even care about complying to it?

The authority in charge of imports in any given country?

Country, or trading bloc such as the EU. The US can't negotiate directly with EU member states, as Trump discovered repeatedly in a meeting with Merkel.

OP's language wasn't clear but I expect they mean additional tariffs on US goods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com