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Comment by beginningguava | Hacker News Reader

The US led the world in emission reductions in 2018, meanwhile the EU, Canada, India, and China increased their production significantly. Yet the US gets slammed by the global community

https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k

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Because the US is so high absolutely. Should it get an award just because natural gas got cheaper than coal?

Yes it should. It made it happen because instead of having endless meetings and brainstorming sessions in Lesbos or Johannesburg, the heartless ignoramuses of Texas figured out how to drill for clean energy. What really did the brainstormes accomplish considering the chart presented?

You think fracking is clean?

You think the "brainstorming sessions" accomplished nothing because of cherry picked single year data on Imgur?

Yikes.

Absolutely not.

One useful rhetorical side effect is breaking the narrative linking GDP with petrol consumption. Opening people's mind's to the possibility that conservation and switching to renewable won't crater the economy.

Perceptions matter.

Growing is easy when you start from zero, and reducing is easy when you can easily move your production elsewhere. BP statistical review probably have their numbers right, I'm more concern about the message they want to spread. (I do not say that EU/China should be able to increase their emissions, just that the US is not decreasing its consumption therefore it is impossible to decrease emission)

The USA with 4% of the world's population is responsible for over a third of the greenhouse gases unnaturally released.

You better believe the global community will slam the USA for their emissions.

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

Other countries have their issues and NOBODY is defending them here. So I'm not sure what you're getting at with the rest of that statement.

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