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Comment by bouke | Hacker News Reader

There's lies, damned lies and statistics. I think it's very nice that percentage-wise an improvement has been made. However, when looking at the absolute numbers from a different perspective;

    US 5087M tonnes, 327M inhabitants -> ~15 tonnes/inhabitant
    EU 4152M tonnes, 511M inhabitants -> ~8 tonnes/inhabitant

Seems to me that the US still has a long way to go...

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Production creates emissions, not people. A more informative ratio is tons/GDP

US 5087M tons, $19.4 trillion GDP -> 262 tons/M$

EU 4152M tonnes, $17.1 trillion GDP -> 242 tons/M$

So still worse, but not as bad as that.

Higher wealth is no excuse to produce higher emissions, if anything it should be the opposite - those with the wealth should use it to better control all negative externalities.

Wealth != production, however. As a wealthy country, you are right to argue that we should be more efficient, but some types of “production” just inherently produce a lot of CO2. A country with no heavy industry will probably have a lower per capita carbon footprint than a country with a large steel industry, but the former country couldn’t necessarily produce that steel with any less carbon, and the atmosphere doesn’t really care where the initial source is, only the absolute numbers involved.

Very few manufactured goods directly require much in the way of emissions. Currently companies simply trading off external costs for free, but their are generally many viable alternatives should such emissions be fined.

Awesome. Let's get fining!

If you have two industries, one that is highly carbon intensive and another that is less intensive, it doesn't make sense to say each country should have a "fair share" of both. Maybe country A is better at the carbon intensive one and country B is better at the non-carbon intensive one, so there's no reason to expect countries to be equal in how much carbon per anything they use. From the perspective of the entire world, somebody has to do all sorts of different things, so it's probably not fair to discriminate between legitimate industries. We do want to reduce the amount of carbon used by all industries, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to require them to be equal. It would be like saying a heavy truck has to use the same amount of fossil fuels as a moped.

Banking does not create meaningful emissions. So emission vs GDP when ignoring imported goods is meaningless.

Not meaningless, but I agree it says more about industry composition than how green their energy is.

Emissions vs people is a good metric if you think that every person should get an emissions budget. If pollution externalities are inevitable, it's most just to require that a Nepali and an American have the same emissions budget. Why does an American get to pollute way more?

If person A drives a truck, and person B writes code at their desk, it doesn't make sense to say we have to equalize their carbon usage, whether per person or per $ of income or output. Some activities inherently use more fossil fuels than others. Making them all use equal amounts is not a reasonable goal, just because we are trying to reduce them all.

It's not about comparing two individuals, but national budgets. One country shouldn't be able to pollute 10x another country without repercussions.

Why not? You are assuming each country does basically the same stuff, rather than a divergent set of stuff they do best. If you drive people around in a car for a living, and I don't, it's palpably unfair to hold us to the same carbon budget. If you weren't driving me, I'd be driving you!

There is no reason the industry in one country should be exactly as carbon intensive as that in another, any more than the IT sector should be the same relative size, or the steelmaking sector should be the same.

It's equivalent to saying each person should get a production budget, that every person in the world should have an equal income.

If you're more efficient, you can produce more with the same emissions budget.

>Production creates emissions, not people

People most certainly create emissions, and manufacturing and construction accounts for just 20%.

AC, heated pools, cheap houses with little insulation, long commutes, SUVs, to the door delivery, etc.

Just for fun, an average human produces ~0.35 tonnes of CO2 a year due to breathing. [0]

[0] http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-much-does-human-breathing...

Just a brief melange of twitter links, but worth noting that:

Global carbon emissions supposedly increased 1-3% for 2017: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/web/status/930027167689342976

And US EPA might’ve been underreporting some it’s methane emissions by 60% : https://mobile.twitter.com/chrfield/status/10153735848757289...

The US’s emission declines are decreasing due to economic / administration changes - from https://amp.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/limiting-g... - “News in recent days that the Trump administration plans to bolster the ailing US coal-fired power industry by intervening in markets would worsen the global emissions picture.

The CSIRO's Dr Canadell said while US carbon emissions had fallen for a decade, last year's decline will likely be much smaller because of quickening economic growth at home and abroad.”

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