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Comment by stanfordkid | Hacker News Reader

What's left out is the industrial output of China -- which is probably producing for much of the EU and USA. It takes power to produce cheap phones and plastic knick-knacks for western consumers. The fact that the Chinese economy will adapt to meet these demands is inevitable. What is the coal output per capita, subtracting industrial output dedicated to exports to the US/Eurozone -- this would be a more fair assessment.

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The standard measurement is CO2 emissions in kg per PPP $ of GDP.

By that measure, China emits about twice what the US does, 0.6 vs 0.3. However China has done about twice as well as the US has in reducing this number, which is why China is on track to meeting their Paris commitments and the US isn't.

Maybe China is doing all the energy intensive low margin work. Since its low margin energy must be dirt cheap, and literal dirt is still the cheapest way to generate power.

Not letting China totally off the hook, just suggesting that there is an economic force driving them toward the bottom of the barrel for cheap energy. California gets up to 50% of its power from solar during midday, but it also does a lot of much higher margin work like software, design, skilled manufacturing, etc.

The world CO2 per GDP number is falling, which is a good sign:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pp.gd

Different sectors of the economy have different energy intensities. China's is much more reliant on heavy industry than more developed countries, which are service-sector dominated.

Just a quick comparison of the share of industry in each region's GDP:

  * China: 40% industry
  * Japan: 30% industry
  * EU: 25% industry
  * USA: 19% industry

China's GDP appears to be about 20% export-driven. Subtracting this still leaves China the greatest polluter in the world, and by a large margin, the greatest polluter per unit of GDP, which is the real measure we should be looking at.

Also, you have it backwards. CCP had the option to create an export-driven economy, as well as the option on how to power it. Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."

The Chinese government has a lot of agency, and a lot of culpability, in this.

Why should we look at pollution per GDP? I'd contest that pollution per capita is a more humanistic, less capitalistic view, and helps contextualize some geographic features better than GDP.

If your concern is efficiency of production, than pollution per unit of GDP is valid. If you want fairness based on population, then you can look at pollution per person, but that metric won’t really tell you how/where things can be improved.

What it does show is that China’s CO2 use is mainly industrial while in America it is much more personal

Seems like an absurd measure when comparing service versus production driven economies. GDP doesn’t measure whether you sold 1 million copies of a film, or manufactured the cameras out of raw materials to produce them. Obviously one has a significantly more linear relationship to carbon output than the other.

If it's geographically, then don't account per capita. Account absolute values per country.

> Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."

No, but experience has shown that that is the surest path to economic development - probably the only viable path for a country the size of China. A small city state might be able to develop by establishing itself as a financial or shipping hub, but for a giant country of 1.4 billion people to go from utter poverty to wealth, there's a good argument that it first has to turn itself into the world's factory.

That isn't necessarily a more fair assessment because those things would be made using cleaner power if they were being produced in the EU or the USA. That is, moving manufacturing to China isn't just moving emissions, it's making them worse. Supposedly this is particularly bad with steel and aluminium, because China's government subsidies to their local production means that more efficient, less producing facilities elsewhere are being driven out of business by dirty and inefficient but subsidised Chinese output.

> That isn't necessarily a more fair assessment because those things would be made using cleaner power if they were being produced in the EU or the USA.

It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations. Instead, there would be other nations with lower regulations that these manufacturing processes would move to in order maintain a satisfactory profit.

Or things could just cost more, driving down consumption and thus emissions even further.

> Or things could just cost more

This is why I said manufacturing would move to somewhere with fewer labor/environmental regulations. Things may cost more in the short-run, but that's just before some new, enticing land of opportunities pops up.

Uh, well... if you assume that wanton environmental destruction will never be addressed I guess you are correct.

>It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations.

We should be tariffing nations who don’t live up to our human and environmental rights standards if we actually care about the issues. We should be forcing corporations to be ethical to do business here.

China is building out nuclear faster than anyone else. Eventually the coal will be obsolescent.

True. But the rate of new projects has fallen to almost zero. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

A sister comment to yours took account for this in a link.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...

So the drug dealer has no moral responsibility for social decay when they're selling heroin to an addict?

Prohibition doesn't work. You can murder and imprison millions of dealers; as long as you don't get treatment for addicts it won't matter.

You can eliminate all addiction and spending on illegal drugs, but you still might have social decay because people's needs are going unmet in a given social structure.

The drug dealer is taking advantage of existing social decay but not necessarily creating it; but some do (opioid epidemic for example).

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