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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

How much of this drop is due to the US essentially "exporting" it's emissions?

The underlying data is specifically for "emissions from energy". The emissions created during the production of goods imported into the US are not captured here. Manufacturing that has been off-shored would look like a net positive in US emissions, but could actually result in higher world-wide emissions.

A better view would be “consumption-based emission inventories”

See section III.5 here:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

"... if we switched to a consumption-based reporting system (which corrects for this trade), in 2014 the annual CO2 emissions of many European economies would increase by more than 30% (the UK by 38%; Sweden by 66%; and Belgium's emissions would nearly double); and the USA's emissions would increase by 7%. On the other hand, China's emissions would decrease by 13%; India's by 9%; Russia's by 14% and South Africa by 29%."

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"A better view would be “consumption-based emission inventories”"

That's a different view, to pursue a different agenda, and is certainly not a better view.

When every greenhouse gas emission argument boils down to "Why the US/The West is to blame for everything", it turns the whole discussion into anti-science farce.

But the science of emissions is considered solid among sane people and not a point of contention. It's the economics of emissions that people debate over. So wouldn't it make sense to take on the more economic/political view of the problem ?

Read the numbers! The point is not who is "to blame" for everything, but to measure how the emission-generating supply chains are coupled to consumer demands. The point is that while we only regulate CO2 emissions at the nation-state level, we only generate an incentive to outsource your heavy industries elsewhere (generating the same or greater emissions) and then ship the resulting finished goods over longer distances, adding more carbon.

We need to decrease net global CO2 emissions to zero, and then further into the negatives. Period. Do-or-die. Everything else is a plutocrat's distraction.

Very little. As described in the research (and this is not novel), cheap natural gas from fracking has hugely displaced coal as a domestic power source.

Did the research account for the leak resulted from fracking? This is good news regardless.

The year-over-year change in consumption-based emission inventories probably does not deviate enough from the trend in emissions from energy to make a huge change.

The US would still be the right direction and China and Russia would still be in the wrong direction of the trend.

Russia: yes.

China: not so clear.

As far as climate goes, what matters is the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The amount in the atmosphere is a function of the history of emissions, not just a function of recent emissions. Here's a chart showing cumulative CO2 emissions 1900-2002: https://timeforchange.org/cumulative-co2-emissions-by-countr...

If we were to figure out that total maximum acceptable CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the climate from warming to much, and divvy that up between countries based on nearly any fair allocation method, how much of their quota each country was using would be something like this:

  700% US
  650% Germany
  600% UK
  470% Canada
  450% Russia
  320% France
  260% Japan
  220% Italy
   30% China
   12% India

One could make a decent case that as long as a country is below 100%, it is OK for it to choose growth and development even though that increases emissions.

I believe that this is why most international climate agreements include aid for developing countries. We recognize that even if they put extraordinary effort into it the US, Germany, Russia, etc., would not be able to get down to 100% until long after it was too late, and so we need to convince developing countries to agree to stay well below their fair 100%.

But the way a country normally goes from developing to developed is by exploiting cheap, but environmentally unfriendly, resources. It is only after a country becomes a rich, developed, country that it can afford to exploit clean but expensive technology. If we just ask the developing countries to stay well below their fair 100%, we are in effect asking them to stay poor. They are not going to agree to that.

Hence, developed countries need to pay to build up developing countries to the point where developing countries can become developed countries without needing to exploit cheap but dirty technology.

> One could make a decent case that as long as a country is below 100%, it is OK for it to choose growth and development even though that increases emissions.

No, one can't make a decent case of that. China and India have access to radically better renewable energy technology and coal alternatives including very safe nuclear and natural gas.

The US didn't have access to any of that in 1920. Today is not the same as 70 or 100 years ago. The excuse for burning so much coal is considerably debased now.

It'd be like claiming that the USSR/Britain/France/Rome got to wage massive wars of annexation in the past, why doesn't the new superpower - China - also get to do that across all of Asia? Just because X bad thing happened in the past, it doesn't mean countries in the future should get to replicate the mistakes of the past and that it should be acceptable practice (so that they too get their fair share of doing horrible things).

The whole idea of investing hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy technology over decades is so we don't replicate the mistakes of the past.

Besides the obviousness of that, China and India should desperately want to avoid those past mistakes, both for strategic reasons and for the basic health of their people. Strategically China has to import huge quantities of coal, it'd be better from a security standpoint if they fulfill their energy demands via domestic renewables and nuclear.

There is no good case to be made that China and India should get to repeat the pollution mistakes of the past, that premise falls apart on every challenge.

You seem to be implicitly assuming that the only acceptable level of CO2 in the atmosphere above whatever would be there without human activity is near zero.

The mistake of the past was not that we put CO2 into the atmosphere by using cheap fuels like coal. The mistake was that we did not treat that as a temporary bootstrap phase to build up to where we could switch to cleaner sources.

> Here's a chart showing cumulative CO2 emissions 1900-2002

Such a chart is going to have a glaring omission, and it's the very rapid rise in China's CO2 emissions relative to the rest of the world. I've tried in the past to find much more up-to-date numbers on this, and failed. But it should be clear to anybody that, if you factor in total emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, China is definitely in the top 10 and maybe the top 3.

Arguing that China should get a "by" on emissions runs into the problem that China is now the biggest problem on emissions. In total emissions, China overtook the US as largest around 2005 or so, and now produces twice as much as the second place slot. On a per-capita basis, China is worse than the EU, although not quite as bad as the rich EU countries or the US. And it's not like China doesn't have the ability to produce green energy--the largest solar manufacturers are all Chinese.

One facet of history is that, on an international scale, countries came to displace their predecessors not by emulating their technology but by being at the forefront of newer, better technologies. There really should be no excuse for, nor a need to excuse, inaction.

Before I even looked at this, I just knew commie china would be leading the offenders. Too bad we couldnt just install a big dome over them and see what happens.

Very funny statement. Why US is in right direction? Do you know the absolute volume of how much US produced CO2 emissions in 2017, and compared with other countries?

its emissions

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