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Comment by wtdata | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that most of the ideas you propose - although good - only have force in the West.

Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment. EU has decreased their CO2 emissions by 20% during the last 30 years. USA has maintained them. China and India, increased them by 300% and China alone now emits more CO2 than USA, EU and Canada combined.

This is not to say that Western countries can just cross their arms and do nothing, but, they are not the ones that are going to change the picture and all this discourse about global warming has been turned in an anti-West political weapon that never addresses the real issues and never has the courage to point their finger at the countries that are the biggest problem at the moment.

This way, I fear no real change will happen until it's too late.

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> Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment

Disagree. How many products in your house/apartment are 'made in china'?

The West has simply outsourced its pollution.

> Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment...

I believe this is a misconception. We didn't decrease our emissions, we outsourced them. A lot of the China pollution is due to exports for western consumption. Just look at the trade "disbalance" between China and USA.

I don't think you can account anywhere near 100% of China's increased emissions by what the USA "outsourced" in shifting its manufacturing there.

China is developing into a first-world nation with over a billion people. That's a lot of manufacturing and infrastructure development for purely domestic purposes. Building cities, streets, highways, railways, automobiles, that's a huge amount of metal and cement production.

If you want to blame the USA and other China-product-consuming countries for China's emissions, it's more for sending so much money in their direction on goods to fund all this large-scale development.

Nobody is saying it's 100%

China is taking the problem seriously. Although their one-party rule is deplorable for human rights, it enables China to move rapidly on major technological issues like this because the economy is shaped by edicts from the top.

Anyone in the West who's trying to shift the blame to China is deluding themselves. We need to fix our politics so we can move with the same determination as China on this specific issue, not the other way around.

If they're taking it seriously, why do they keep building coal power plants, building ghost towns, and manufacturing products that won't be sold just to inflate their GDP numbers?

Despite the recent improvements, the EU still emits more CO2 per capita than China and India [1]. Thus, most of the reduction still need to come from the western countries. (Though that will change soon if the current trend continues).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

This doesn't make sense. Nobody is expecting Qatar (with the highest per capita emissions) to make the largest contribution to fixing the problem.

What's important is the actual reduction in emissions, and the jurisdiction with control over the largest quantity is most capable of reducing the total.

That's right, there are EU countries we could wipe off the face of the planet and it wouldn't make any difference.

Looking at per-capita numbers and trying to hold everyone in the world to the same standard has never been the way the world works, and if we tried to establish such a system, we'd never make any progress on this issue.

(If we wanted to hold everyone to the same standard, we could divert income from the rich and make them poor, because consumption pretty much increases linearly with income, except at the top decile where consumption increases massively. But attacking the richest isn't gonna save us either, because planet earth doesn't give a crap about the income levels of whoever's putting CO2 into the atmosphere. All that matters is how much of it we put in there.)

One of the best ways to instantly (almost) reduce emissions is to stop farming and consuming beef.

Better would be all meat altogether, but by far the lowest hanging fruit is to stop beef production and farming.

I don't know how you consider it "lowest hanging fruit" when beef is so tasty.

My current diet, I do not wish to state. However, I was a vegetarian in some phases of my life. If motivated enough, I could be a vegetarian for life. However, it would be a folly if I were to start believing that everyone can make sacrifices of this kind. For some people, giving up on things they like to eat is very hard. For some, giving up on using their car is hard. People can do different things to help and not everyone needs to do every single thing. An extreme approach is not practical and it's next to impossible to "sell" such an idea.

It's true, the USA isn't really at the helm anymore. We have high per-capita CO2 figures, but in absolute terms we're in the ballpark of just 50% of China's emissions.

India is set to explode, and there are already reports of manufacturing migrating there because China is becoming expensive as they get their act together.

When the dust settles I imagine China and India will be the dominant emitters with their massive populations. Every time these countries move their quality of life needle the slightest bit upwards across their population it makes a big impact.

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