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Comment by lostmymind66 | Hacker News Reader

What's also sad is that China and India regularly pollute the atmosphere (and cover it up) with impunity and are left out of all discussions of climate change because somehow 'developing' means you aren't responsible for your actions.

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There is no point in talking about India and China if there is literally no country on Earth that is on track for the 1.5° goal. It just distracts from the problems in your own country to point fingers at China and India.

You can't point fingers at the US when the pollution is so bad in your cities that you need to wear gas masks or risk lung cancer in a few years.

It seems nobody really wants to solve the problem and instead wants to just blame the US/Europe, while ignoring the biggest polluters on the planet.

You can't tell me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China

Is not causing enormous amounts of damage to our environment and planet.

Why? It's no excuse not to do something.

It's like me telling my children they must not smoke, whilst lighting one up.

I'm in the UK. Globally our emissions count for almost nothing. Yet I want people to blame the UK for every misstep and failure on climate. I badly want the UK, and everywhere on the planet net zero, asap. The more pressure to do that, from all sources, the better.

Maybe when someone hits net zero we'll start to see carbon tariffs on all imports... Probably wishful thinking, but I can hope.

Though I agree with you that India and China should do more but they still are way behind in carbon use per person. And are investing heavily on renewables so hopefully will never use as much per person as US or Europe are now.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-thes...

But this is the reason I don't believe we will be able to stop or even slow down climate change much as major power consumption growth is going to be outside US and Europe. So even if they are able to bring down carbon use the growth of carbon use in other places like Africa and Asia will offset it. The world is fucked and I am very pessimistic about it. The world population is expected to go over 10billion in the future but the world can't sustain the 8billion we have now.

Of course the CO2 China and India emit is damaging. But until my country fixes their own problems I don't see why I should tell other people to fix theirs. I probably emit several times as much CO2 as the average Indian.

What we really need to invest in is Nuclear energy. It's clean and efficient. But the liberals in the US will always be against it. Who knows, we might not even have an issue if so many communities around the US had been against it in the 80s and 90s.

The other sad fact is that after all we do to prevent CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere, it won't stop humans from emitting it. I predict the next thing will be population control.

Well, if only that energy some people spend shaming their peers into limiting their lifestyle and forgoing the idea of raising kids was actually spent on legislative framework dealing with the actual biggest polluters, we would be living in a much more enjoyable world.

India is one of the very few countries set to achieve a significant chunk of its Paris commitments. In fact, India is already a global leader in renewables, and it does so in objective conditions far worse than other countries have.

[EDIT: see how India is ranked https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ IMHO Modi will go down in history as the greatest Indian leader after Gandhi]

Inspiring

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