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Comment by alfromspace | Hacker News Reader

That's great, but Europe could dial all emissions to zero right now there would be virtually no impact. Even the US doing the same would hardly put a dent in climate change's trajectory, and the issue people have is that we can't simply assume that if we overhaul our entire economies at ruinous cost, China (over 2x America's emissions now and increasing every day), India, Russia, etc will be inspired to get on board. We need a binding global solution. Domestic solutions seem worthless to me.

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> overhaul our entire economies at ruinous cost

Reading this gives me a headache. Guess what will WAY be worse than that?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5-lDJWCUAAwfya.jpg

Also most of the developing countries, those people like you like to point their finger at and use as an excuse to keep dooming yourself, your planet and most of all your children's futures, will be hit first and the hardest by climate change. And they know it. China is already coming around.

I'm seeing a lot of rhetoric and no substance. Yawn.

If the industrialized world can make greener tech and practices cost-effective (with or without a carbon tax), that efficiency and economy of scale will radiate out to the rest of the world in a positive feedback loop. The problem isn't that scalable solutions don't exist; it's that oil and gas are still (artificially) cheap by comparison. It's one thing to ask the Western middle class to take a hit to their lifestyles, but the working poor across the world don't have that option.

Per country emissions is a terrible measure, because the atmosphere doesn't care about country boundaries. For accessing whether or not a country is doing its share to address the problem, per capita emissions is a much better measure.

The atmosphere cares even less about per capita than per country. It doesn't care about whether we "do our share" either.

You specifically called out China for high emissions. If you measure per country, then if China were to split up into several smaller countries, all of which keep the same per capita emissions, by per country they would all be low emissions countries. That nicely illustrates the absurdity of per country.

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