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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

China is the world's #1 carbon emitter, the top emitter per GDP, and has over 200gw of new coal still planned. (For scale, California consumes about 50gw on a hot day.) So they are not even unrelated problems.

China is also the top source of plastic in the ocean.

Tangent but: the way China turned out has IMHO been the major factor in the collapse of the post cold war neoliberal narrative in the West. The idea was that freedom and prosperity are a reinforcing cycle has been disproven. China shows that at least the business parts of capitalism work just fine without human rights and that therefore prosperity and totalitarianism are compatible.

The collapse of that narrative has in turn unleashed a revival of hard right fascist and hard left socialist ideology in the West.

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That carbon emitted is largely from the manufacturing of cheap products that you consumed. Western countries have offshored both manufacturing and the associated pollution to a country more concerned about pulling its people out of poverty than about its environment. The ocean plastic is partly from these industrial processes and partly because western countries have exported most of their plastic waste to China for more than a decade.

Also, according to this, China's per capita emissions are half that of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I think per capita emissions are not the right measure to describe the worst polluters. You are right, prices paid for "cheap products" we consume don't include the costs associated with CO2 emissions, but if they did they wouldn't have much to do with a producer's population. A better measure is emissions per dollar GDP, where emissions (a cost) is relative to what gets produced (the benefit).

Per capita emissions is not the right metric. It seems like it should be, but if you compare by that metric you're really measuring poverty below a certain threshold. A poor nation might have low CO2 per capita just because it's poor, but what production they do have could be fantastically inefficient (and often is due to old technology). As they climb out of poverty, as all seem to be doing, they'll become huge emitters.

Emissions per GDP is probably the best we have as GDP is a decent proxy for productivity, making it a real measure of efficiency. If the goal is to actually reduce emissions the goal must be to reduce CO2 emitted per unit of productivity, so you want to emulate the wealthier nations that have low CO2/GDP scores. That means emulating policies like renewable energy, efficiency standards, well designed cities, etc.

China is (last I looked) the least efficient large economy in terms of pollution per GDP. The USA is toward the middle of the pack.

I agree that it's quite clear that environmental externalities per dollar GDP (and per dollar of exports) are massive. At the same time consider that as median incomes increase, marginal utility of clean(ish) environment vs income increases, public pressure mounts, and countries do tackle environmental externalities.

That's the story of every country's industrial development since the British industrial revolution. Bread comes first, clean water and air come second. For rich western countries to forget that and demand that China and India put environment ahead of pulling people out of poverty is myopic at best and, realistically, highly hypocritical.

A market for a product does not justify the GHG produced. They choose their method of manufacture. Additionally, wasn't China supposed to be recycling the plastics that were shipped to them?

Before your tangent, I agreed with you.

I agree with everything, including the tangent. China is living proof of how horrible the capitalist "dream" can be in reality, when what flimsy veil of democracy that still existed is stripped away.

I would argue that failure of Neoliberalism has nothing to do with China and has everything to do with flawed economics which assumes that our planet has indefinite resources and wealth can grow infinitely. Authoritarianism is the natural outcome of unchecked capitalism and Marx predicted that a century ago.

> The collapse of that narrative has in turn unleashed a revival of hard right fascist and hard left socialist ideology in the West.

I disagree with that point.

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