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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

A few counter-points:

- US, per capita, has the highest CO2 emissions of any developed country [0]

- It's a little unfair (depending on your idea of fairness) for developed countries to have benefitted from industrialization and polluting the environment only to close the gate behind them and blame other countries for trying to do the same and catch up in development.

- It's expensive to force nations barely entering industrialization to forego the easy route of using coal/oil/whatever pollutant and jump straight to what can, sometimes, be a more expensive energy source.

- Climate change is a global problem that doesn't mesh well with purely isolationist ideologies. This, primarily, is the biggest gripe with the current administration. It doesn't want to lift a single finger without seeing itself as the primary benefactor. This last part is purely opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

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> It's a little unfair

In this context, unfairness is required. It is unfair to tell the entire planet to stop burning carbon. We have been doing it for the better part of 200 years, why do we have to stop now? It is unfair.

But faced with reality, the realities of the universe, of our planet, fairness isn't on the table, the long term survival of billions of people is.

I disagree with flat out withdrawing from the climate accords, but saying its unfair so the two most populous countries in the world can continue to build up fossil fuel infrastructure for the next decade + is absurd. It should be an international stop, with developed nations subsidizing the cost of development of not-yet-first-world-countries by providing them access to cheaper clean energy, not giving them cart blanche to keep burning carbon.

Just a nitpick. According to the list you referenced, the developed country with the highest CO2 emissions per capita is Luxembourg. The US comes second.

The US is second, the spirit of your point stands though.

Another surprising thing I learned from the list, US emissions have decreased significantly from 19.6 to 16.4 (tonnes per capita) during the obama administration.

> the developed country with the highest CO2 emissions per capita is Luxembourg. The US comes second.

You're right, that was an oversight on my part.

> Another surprising thing I learned from the list, US emissions have decreased significantly from 19.6 to 16.4 (tonnes per capita) during the obama administration.

This may actually be, in large part, due to the EPA. It would be interesting to see data for more recent years as well as end of this year (if it's not too soon) to see how it all changes.

The decrease in emissions is due to increased emissions requirements on coal plants (lots of smaller ones have been shutting down) and fracking.

Fracking makes cheap natural gas which drives electric generation investment towards natural gas which emits about 1/2 as much carbon per unit of energy as coal.

Low gas prices means that the investments required to meet coal regulations won't ever pay off. Plants shut down.

See it's stuff like this that makes me suspect that the climate change debate is more about virtue signaling than any actual threat. Because really if we honestly believed that the earth was warming because of carbon and that this presented a serious threat to the planet, we wouldn't be like "oh well fairness dictates that we let some countries keep emitting high levels of carbon." That consideration wouldn't even come up in a situation where we were faced with a serious planetary threat.

The only reason that this is even coming up is because climate change proponents, deep inside, believe that there will be no serious adverse consequences from climate change.

> The only reason that this is even coming up is because climate change proponents, deep inside, believe that there will be no serious adverse consequences from climate change.

That's not the case at all. The world isn't really a black/white place. In an ideal world, we'd all stop right now and focus -- concertedly -- our efforts on reverting climate change. Unfortunately, life just doesn't work like that.

You go ahead and tell two large, thriving and growing, economies that "oops, we screwed up the planet, but at least we made a ton of money and our citizens live a nice quality of life! Wait, what? You want to improve your country, too? Well, you see, we sort of screwed up the planet and now you need to bear the responsibility on our behalf. Yes, that means stifling your economy and keeping your citizens in poverty. Yes, this also means the world will continue to view you as poor, undeveloped countries. What's that? For how long? Well, we don't really know, I mean, it could be a while..."

But it's not as if China, India, etc haven't benefited from the West's carbon-fueled economic growth. It was that economic growth that led to all the various technologies that they've imported. The West has also borne, and is bearing, the costs of R&D on green energy.

If we are talking about "inequities", I would say these countries took an "unfair" leap in technological development because of us, so it is not entirely unreasonable to say the disadvantage of less carbon use has been more than offset by tech transfer. Especially since China and India are both notorious for not respecting IP rights.

If not for the West, neither of these countries would even be in a position to want higher carbon emissions.

But you're just sidestepping my point.

In the case of an actual planetary threat the argument you describe about letting poor countries catch up would be incoherent and insane. Let's change the scenario here and make it more extreme, imagine instead of CO2 our industry released lead and we knew over time the whole world would get lead poisoning and all humans would get sick from lead poisoning and die out if we continue on our path. In such a scenario, would we

1) Have rich nations stop emissions out lead but still allow developing nations to have lead emissions cause, hey we may all die, but it's only fair, I mean they should enjoy the same standard of living as us

2) Have everyone stop putting out lead emissions because, as crappy as it is, everyone attaining a western standard of living is not as important as preventing human extinction.

I think we would all agree that option 2 was the only option. Option 1 would be incoherent and insane. The only case in which we would even consider option 1 is one in which there is no real coherent planetary threat.

Now climate change proponents may not be suggesting human extinction but you are suggesting widespread, possibly civilization ending catastrophe. This leaves scenario 1 as the only real choice and scenario 2 as incoherent and stupid. Yet climate changers still advocate and openly push for scenario 2 . . . which would lead any reasonable person to question the sincerity of their belief in planetary environmental catastrophe.

> But you're just sidestepping my point.

I think I'm not making myself clear enough. Politics often requires compromise. Until we have a global hegemony, there's no way to enforce one set of rules across all others. This is also the reason you can have such wildly different political views and oppositions of governance that can both, simultaneously, work for their respective regions while not working well for the whole.

By painting the issue as black/white, you're grossly neglecting others' needs. It's easy to say that when, by no stretch of the imagination, you're likely living in a well-off and developed country with a pretty decent quality of life. Please, recognize the advantages and luxuries you've been afforded and take a moment to understand that others don't even have a fraction of that. They're just trying to reach a fraction. Can we resolve this climate problem and simultaneously keep developing countries from stagnation and regression? Sure, it just won't be easy. And that's why there are compromises made.

>Politics often requires compromise.

But potential planetary catastrophe is not a political issue and not an issue that allows for much compromise. Sure there is political hand wringing about whether it is really happening and what its consequences are . . . But once you accept that it is real and potentially destructive it becomes a question of preventing planetary catastrophe which is not political and seems very very black and white and not open to compromise.

>Can we resolve this climate problem and simultaneously keep developing countries from stagnation and regression? Sure, it just won't be easy

If climate change truly has the negative potential that you claim, how could you even risk it - if it really were as bad as you say wouldn't the consequence for both developing and developed countries be much worse by allowing for continued emissions?

> But potential planetary catastrophe is not a political issue...

Tell that to the American Republican party.

> If climate change truly has the negative potential that you claim, how could you even risk it

We've crossed the point of no return already, the question is now "how do we minimize the looming repercussions"? Part of that is to have the world transition, even if at different rates, to renewable energy. There's a lot of hang-up on this different rates part. There's no blank check for China/India on this, they just have a longer period to catch up in renewable energy.

The developed world has committed to a reasonable upcoming transitional period and the developing world will be carried along, financially, to keep up or given a larger transition window.

I'd love for the world to have just done this a decade ago, but that's not the case. I'd love for us to stop today, immediately, all over and just change to renewables, but that can't be the case. Again, the world's complicated and neither one of us armchair politicians really grasp just how complicated geopolitics are.

- US, per capita, has the highest CO2 emissions of any developed country

It also has one of the highest GDP (output) per capita. Output requires energy input.

I don't think there's a single economist in the world, without significant bias, who doesn't believe that China will be a serious economic powerhouse when it becomes a more developed nation.

For a developed country, the US has quite low GDP output per emissions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...

Only Australia (another country full of climate change denialism) and Israel fare worse. Canada is rather comparable.

On the other hand, some European countries (e.g. France, UK) are nearly double gdp per emissions. Even Germany with its relatively large industrial sector has far better GDP per CO2 ton.

That's looking purely at CO2. Not energy.

Why is that relevant?

Either the US has poor energy efficiency (GDP output per energy input) or the US has energy sources that are highly carbon intensive. Both are bad.

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