If anything I expect us to increase in CO2 while we retrofit buildings with better technology, build clean power generation and grid tech, and continue in our research.
There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it’s not the United States.
That's like trying to sell someone a $10 carrot by saying it's 50% off, or an over-weight person thinking it's okay that they're eating a bag of chips because they went to the gym.
They're wrong...but not nearly as wrong as everyone else.
The US pollution being "only" about 15% of the world pollution wouldn't be something I'd pat myself on the back, if I'd be American ;-)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-sha...
So I am curious if there's a way to associate emissions to different categories of productivity and see if we're more wasteful, on average, when it comes to specific parts of our GDP (e.g. using personal automobiles).
I'm not saying this in the self-hating way that I think is trendy for people in the US, but I am curious in the way that, if we want to improve, we could focus on specific parts of the economy that are more wasteful than others. (Driving would be an obvious one, hence the example.)
All you're really saying here is, "it's alright that our CO2 emissions are so high because we're also such greedy materialistic bastards". That's not a great argument.
I was raised by parents who loved me a lot and did a pretty good job raising me. Had they been delinquent and raised me poorly, value would have been lost, but the GDP would have been none the wiser.
You can't be serious. There is no plural. There is only one country that emits more than the USA and it has four times as many people, 14% of its emissions are caused by manufacturing products that are consumed in other countries and it has invested more in green technology than any other country on earth.
Is "we" the US? laughs
This sentence becomes more true if you replace "we" with "China". Because China actually contributed significantly to green energy tech by making solar panels dead cheap to produce. Or replace it with "Germany". In that case the number is way off (it's more like 2% of worldwide emissions) but the tech contribution holds up if you look for example at wind power plant tech development and having provided monetary incentives for decades already to deploy solar power at large scale (which in turn allowed China to drive down solar production cost by creating the necessary demand for products).
Where is this significant contribution of the US to green energy tech? Because I mostly see significant contributions to keeping the fossil fuel economy alive (large scale research and deployment of fracking tech, cheap gas prices, inefficient car designs and A/C installations anywhere).
The incredible irresponsibility here really earns the downvotes.
As other commenters pointed out, the US still #1 in cumulative emissions, so the warming we see today and for the next ~10 years is mostly due to the US. Second, the US is absolutely terrible when it comes to per-capita emissions. This is not an example for the world to follow. There is zero moral high ground in telling developing nations to cut emissions and yet gluttonously continuing BAU. If they follow the same carbon intensity curve, the planet is absolutely f*ed. The US and western countries have an obligation to demonstrate how to run a complex developed economy with low, or eventually, no emissions.
The thesis is for us to get there, we need to increase CO2 output, not reduce it. Let's think about how much CO2 investment would be required to fulfill these projects in the "Green New Deal":
* Coast to coast high-speed rail.
* Retrofitting all major buildings in the USA with better technologies.
* Decommissioning dirty power plants.
* Building nation-wide wind and other green power generating infrastructure.
And we should put our foot on the gas for new green energy research. Inventing better and more efficient technologies has the benefit of reducing global CO2 output.
ftfy.
The truth is that we could reduce emissions by living less affluent lifestyles, like, say, the 1950s. Smaller houses, fewer per capita miles driven, little or no intercontinental or transcontinental flights, less meat. But we won't. We cannot step off the hedonistic treadmill, even for a second, or the economy will collapse. And we can think of nothing worse than the economy collapsing. So we create a false dilemma, an impossible constraint system. So we will fail.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
The US is responsible for 25% of cumulative emissions.
Still #1, but to be 'mostly' responsible it would have to have emitted more than double the total which it actually has.
Right now, in India, there is sewage in the streets and profound and extreme poverty. Aspiring to Indian emissions is necessarily aspiring to an Indian quality of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
edit: being nicer
Definitely two different things.
At projected rates when will China "catch up" in terms of all time total?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
So I strongly suspect they will.