Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

> It is truly tragic that the U.S. has abandoned its leadership and moral authority on one of the critical issues of our time.

Leadership in fighting climate change? Cmon' every EU-country is better at fighting climate change than the US. Denmark has at least 50% of their energy coming from their huge wind farms. Norway has a huge network of chargers for electrical cars, tax cuts for electrical cars and Sweden is huge in all sorts of environmental savings.

In Sweden you can't even order a fucking burger without seeing how much CO2 that produces and ads for vegetarian burgers that are better for the environment.

If you really think US is good at all at fighting climate change, you should really come to the EU and watch us recycle. Even during the recent terror attack in Stockholm there were people recycling.

Proof:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio-content/archive/undertheinfluence/ma...

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2012/1204/360_intl_healthy...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/64199h/two_swedes_r...

The Paris Agreement, though, was to a large extent pushed by the Obama administration (and later China). While the EU is doing fairly well on renewable energy and general efficiency improvement (though even within the EU there's a lot of variation), it has not been particularly good at getting other countries to follow.

Do you have any sources that would confirm that US politicians were pushing the paris accord on a larger extent than Swedens politicians?

Even if we're fewer, I think we're actually pushing really hard.

Leadership involves taking the initiative and having others follow. With the former, many European countries are undoubtedly king. It's with the latter that we run into problems. Europe, charitably, is a loose collection of semi-aligned states. It isn't (yet) set up to project stature or influence.

EU combined is ~510 million people. More than the US and while there are differnt amounts of variation when it comes to how much countries spend to fight climate change there is practially no different in the agreement that it is real and we must all work together to fight it.

Your president and a lot of US citizens don't even acknowledge that there is a climate change. You are far from any kind of leadership in that regard.

I think EU takes the initiative and is king in making the world follow. Either because they want to or simply because they have to.

> EU combined is ~510 million people. More than the US and while there are differnt amounts of variation when it comes to how much countries spend to fight climate change there is practially no different in the agreement that it is real and we must all work together to fight it.

Southeast Asia contains most of the world's people and a huge fraction of the world's GDP. Apart from China, however, it's uncoördinated. A small action by the United States means more than many large actions by smaller European states. This makes sense from game theoretic as well as simple sociopolitical perspectives. This is part of the package one takes when choosing the confederated structure the EU has opted for.

> When these were taken into account, only Sweden’s record was judged compatible with the Paris goals.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/only-swe...

People can claim a lot about other countries and there is a lot of things we do shittier than others. But in fighting climate change, there is no better country than Sweden.

Since we can, you can as well. Taking leadership is possible as a little country. We can show you all that it is possible and that you can gain economical benefits from it. In Sweden, fighting climate change is a cultural thing like it should be in the entire world.

Its truly tragic that the US and US medias are clouded by solipsism that they phrase their sentences like that.

Not arguing in favor of US but how can you compare the size of these small countries with US size in terms of distributing energy?

If anything this favors U.S.. In a small country, it is harder to balance out renewable energy sources, i.e. if there is no wind in Tennessee there is likely some in Iowa, but that doesn't work as easily for regions of Poland. And yet, they are doing it.

Energy distribution, be it from solar/wind/water/natural gas, is a question of logistics.

Most EU countries are connected to the grids of other countries to some extent (even the UK and Ireland have underwater interconnectors, though they're rather limited).

You might as well argue that it's impossible to distribute beer to a country of 320M people, yet inhabitants of large countries don't go thirsty.

Whether we talk about a union of 320M as the US or a union of 510M as the EU, or whether we talk about a state like Michigan with 9M inhabitants or a nation like Sweden with 10M hardly matters. There are roads, electrical grids and similar infrastructure everywhere in the modern world.

It's not the distribution that's the problem. It's political will.

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