https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-in-2017-us-h...
Fracking isn't without its drawbacks. And since there is essentially no public information on what chemicals they even pump into the ground (which almost certainly leaks to groundwater sometimes, because things go wrong - like oil spills) it's a little hard to assess its environmental impact. At least in the US, the fracking companies don't have to tell anybody (including the government) what chemicals they are using.
This is utterly terrifying. Private companies can pump unspecified junk in to the ground with ZERO oversight? That cannot be right! This is why British people are always worried when we hear talk of closer alignment with US environmental "protections".
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/frack...
Surely this is sarcasm?
I find it quite strange that people appear to fall into two camps when discussing this issue. Either The US (and other richer nations) need to cut down emissions because they emit far more per capita OR China / India need to control their population growth and associated emissions. We should be encouraging both sides to do their part not arguing over which one it is.
The metric that the Paris Accords (rightly) judges China, the US and other countries on, is the change in emissions per PPP $ of GDP.
By this measure China is absolutely destroying the United States, and is on track to meet it's Paris commitments. Holding your emissions almost constant while tripling your GDP is an impressive achievement; if the US had done the same thing they too would be meeting their Paris commitments.
The Europeans may have reason to criticize China for not doing enough. Americans do not.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/lambas...
[1] https://www.aicgs.org/2019/10/germanys-new-climate-package-t...
Per capita is useful due to the fact that it offers a view of the consumption habit of an aggregate of people. Part of the what made outsourcing economically viable was the lack of regulations in the targetted countries. What drives the demand for this production is consumption habits.
But why don't these governments just tighten regulations? In doing so, they would be opening the door for manufacturing to leave because there are other opportunistic nations wanting that economic boon. How exactly are do you think the people within these nations are going to react when they start losing their jobs, when their country is lent money from the IMF, and then said new regulations have to be rolled back on condition of these new loans.
Note that I don't think the blame can be blamed solely on consumption habits, but you need to acknowledge that there are very real material concerns here and that putting all of the blame on any single government is missing the forest for a single tree.
> Which is after the end of the world by some estimates.
I don't think anyone worth consideration believes this.
The developed world's multinationals relocated much of our emissions to the developing world by putting manufacturing over there, where there are fewer environmental and labour protections. Much of China and India's emissions are really the UK's or the USA's as they're now making our T shirts and electronics, scrapping obsolete ships and electronics or burning our plastic recycling.
By that argument, if China and India were each to split up into several much smaller countries, with every person in each of those countries still emitting as much as they do now, or even increasing greatly their emissions--they would be doing great as far as climate change goes, because each of those small countries would only be responsible for a small amount of the total?
The atmosphere does not care about national boundaries, which is why per capita is the correct way to access a countries emissions compared to other countries.