Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

You may be right, but being European, I fail to see how this responsibility falls on the shoulders of countries here from Ireland to the Ukraine. I mean, wages have stagnated here for the lower-mid class, basically we've never left the recession, what you're saying is a tough sell here.

Not saying we don't care, I'm saying we can't afford to care.

I mean, the West has been giving taxpayer money and aid to Africa for decades, to compensate for colonialism and it has mostly ended up in the hands of corrupt despots and warlords, ironically making life worse for some people there.

So giving more taxpayer money to other corrupt regimes is not something we should quickly jump to.

View on HN

You chopped your forests down to industrialize. Now, the planet's coming to collect on its debt and your names are on the lien. Now's not a convincing time to tell someone else not to take on a loan of their own. Now's not a convincing time to tell someone else to pay down your debt.

Sure, but most gains from industrialization were sucked up by big corp shareholders and are stashed away in tax havens. How about we collect from there instead of average Joe working 2 jobs to make ends meet.

The MO of industrialization has always been corporate profits on environmental destruction while having taxpayers pay for the aftermath. Privatize the winnings, socialize the losses.

It's time to have corporations responsible for fixing the aftermath of their quarterly targets.

When did anyone suggest that to not be how governments might go about fundraising their payments to preserve the Amazon?

Our countries have a lot of forest. This eternal apologizing of the greatest culprits of ecological catastrophe (i.e. mostly non-Western countries), is the actual problem.

People following your ideology don't care about global warming, they care about blaming the West (the ones making an effort to clean things up) at every turn while giving a pass to the countries actually polluting the planet (just as long as they aren't westerners).

Are you kidding me? The US contributes as much carbon to the atmosphere as China while sustaining a third as much people. Making an effort to clean up, my ass.

Your facts are completely wrong.

China now produces more CO2 that all other 1st world countries together [1], while having increased their emissions by 300% in the last 30 years and are set to increase them a further 30% during the next 10. [2]

USA maintained their emissions during the past 30 years and are set to slightly reduce them in the next 10. [3]

EU reduced their emissions by 25% during the last 30 years, and are set to reduce them a further 20% during the next 10. [4]

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

[2] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

[3] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/

[4] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/

Whoops, out of date data for me. Yup, China is awful: 2x the emissions with 3x the people but each individual American is significantly worse. Individual Americans don’t get to blame Chinese people when all they’re doing is trying to catch up to American standards of living.

The best part is how easy it is to be carbon negative. I am, and lots of the people pointing fingers at China aren’t. So, take the beam out of your eye.

And this is not counting that what’s important is the area under the curve, not the present value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com