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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Let me restate your point, because it’s a good one. The gist of your point is, if there is no collective action, then nothing will change, and “why should I make my lifestyle worse” if nothing will change?

The next step to realize is that, in the US, our “shared CO2 budget” is zero, possibly negative, in light of continued development in China, India, and Africa. Imagine how much CO2 emissions could be reduced if everyone in the US became vegan tomorrow. Now, realize that Chinese development in last year alone went up by enough to offset the entirety of that hypothetical savings.

Why “should I make my lifestyle worse” when development in India, China, and Africa is going to increase global CO2 output by multiples of the entire output of the US and EU combined?

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My personal opinion is that citizens of democracies need to demand urgent action from their government, and that action will include wealth transfer to developing nations to help them decarbonize and trade sanctions and theoretically even war (or at least the threat of war) against authoritarian countries that refuse to meet their global obligations.

This is a global problem, and it requires global action to have any hope.

For what it's worth, I think the risk of Chinese and Indian pollution is overstated. At least the Chinese government accepts that climate change is a real threat (unlike the current US administration) and is moving (too slowly, but still) in the right policy direction.

Aren't Chinese moving faster than pretty much everyone? Last I checked, they were pretty into reducing use of coal, and deploying a lot of nuclear power plants instead.

Agree about wealth transfer to developing nations, and honestly I'd also love to see IP transfer. Developing nations have the right to the same life-saving and life-improving technologies the West enjoys, but they also have the opportunity to leap-frog and skip the high-carbon-footprint parts, the way they did with phones (skipping landlines and going straight to cellular). We should at least strongly encourage them to do that leapfrogging - though preferably by subsidizing it instead of threatening war.

> Aren't Chinese moving faster than pretty much everyone? Last I checked, they were pretty into reducing use of coal, and deploying a lot of nuclear power plants instead.

China currently has so many coal plants under construction that their output exceed’s the US coal industry’s entire output. China’s goal is to have 20% EVs in the consumer vehicles market by 2025. That means China will put 100 million new ICE vehicles on the road over the next 5 years, and will continue to put tens of millions of additional ICE vehicles on the road each year after that. China is building whole new cities. Construction releases enormous amounts of CO2. Construction releases so much CO2 that a fancy new LEED building takes decades to pay off its construction footprint with energy savings. From 2000 to 2015, China added over 6 gigatons of CO2 output. That’s more than the entire US. In 2017, China added 120 megatons of CO2 output while the US cut 40 megatons.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast, but the sad truth is that it's all too slow: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

The next couple generations are in for a rough, rough ride.

Your point about IP transfer is a good one.

> Why “should I make my lifestyle worse” when development in India, China, and Africa is going to increase global CO2 output by multiples of the entire output of the US and EU combined?

Because you are already producing 10x [1] the amount of CO2 that a person in India is.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

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