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Comment by Merad | Hacker News Reader

Not in the US. The majority of the country isn't to the point of believing that climate change poses a serious threat, and among non-Democrats attitudes towards climate change are actually regressing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...

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Those who haven't experienced it directly might underestimate how effective the right has been at tying anti-environment beliefs to political identity, even among people who are highly educated in the sciences and should know better.

Weather or not the majority believes in climate change is irrelevant. The simple fact is: while the US reduced its total carbon footprint by ~0,4% in 2017, it increased in the EU and China. No reason to point fingers at the US.

Are you suggesting the link is causal?

Classic tragedy of the commons. No one wants to do their part because others aren't trying hard enough to fix the problem.

It is quite a lot easier to reduce when you are using > 2.5 times as much as the ones you are comparing to (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...)

The EU is reducing its carbon footprint if you zoom out from that one year[0]. China also has half of the carbon footprint per person[0]. The US appears the have the highest carbon footprint per capita of the major nations, beaten only by small countries[1].

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...

Except that EU has been doing it's job since the 90s and China has been doing it as well in recent years. They both slipped the last 12 months and a lot of it, at least in Europe is combination of side-effects of the post-Fukushima nuclear scare and increase in greeny renewables (like solar and wind) that actually cause more methane and coal to burn because they cannot work as reliable base supply.

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