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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

The world population is 7.8 billion people. The US population is ~330 million people. So the US has ~4% of the world population.

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 ;-)

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Fair, but the US also produces 15% of the world's GDP [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-sha...

I get this point and am mostly in agreement with the intent. However, the US is also more of a service economy, which would lead me to believe we should tend to have lower emissions/productivity compared to other countries that mostly produce goods instead.

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.)

In 2018, 69% of the US GDP was Personal Consumption. The contribution from Net Exports was -5%. Yes, minus 5.

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.

GDP is a bad metric. It mostly measures how "good" you are at tracking wealth. Much of value in society is not captured by GDP.

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.

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