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Comment by maxmalysh | Hacker News Reader

What's your opinion on China's and India's impact on global warming? I am honestly interested.

If the US had the same per capita emissions as India I'd personally organize a parade in the streets. I'd openly weep with how amazing that would be. I'd build statues to the leaders who made that happen.

That's how I feel about India's impact on global warming.

You’d be incredibly poor though, because the US produces a tremendous amount of wealth in GDP per carbon emission - much greater than India or China.

India and the US emit almost exactly the same C02 per GDP dollar, but China is quite a lot worse.

Germany, OTOH is over 1/3rd less than the US and similarly rich, and Japan is quite efficient too.

Figures in kg per PPP $ of GDP

  China: 0.561
  Germany: 0.189
  India: 0.304
  Japan: 0.243
  US: 0.3

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?view=...

Germany burns a lot of lignite (the dirtiest kind of coal) as well as hard coal, so imagine what that figure would be if the political will existed to shut those power plants down.

To answer the question, 38.6% of Germany's CO2 emissions are from power generation [1], and around 70% of those are from coal power plants [2]. That's 27% of total emissions from burning coal.

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/co2-emissionen-103.ht...

[2] Figure 10, https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...

so imagine what that figure would be if the political will existed to shut those power plants down.

Today Germany announced:

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and Germany's four coal-producing states unveiled details of their plan to phase out coal at the latest by 2038 on Thursday.

The plans outline a timeline for decommissioning lignite-coal power plants in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg as well as easing the financial transition for the states and energy firms involved.

Energy firms will receive a €4.35 billion ($4.85 billion) payout to compensate for the coal phaseout.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-pay-energy-firms-billions-i...

These plans have been public for a while and have been heavily criticised for being far too unambitious. Some of the lignite plants are not scheduled for shutdown until 2034, and hard coal until 2038.

Loudly touting that we're the first to bindingly exit coal with a 2038 target when France's target is 2022, they just haven't enshrined it in law, and Britain's power generation was coal-free for nearly half of 2019 (3665 out of 8760 hours), with a shutdown target of 2025 and coal accounting for just 2% of their electricity generation compared to 40% for Germany's, is just sad. That statement is incredibly carefully crafted to avoid being an outright lie, while still being extremely misleading.

"Coal supplied 2% of UK electricity in 2019, down from 30% in 2014." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal_fired_powe...), and 40% in 2012, sounds a lot better to me.

I don't disagree, but I live in Australia where our PM brings coal into parliament to say how much he loves it. 2038 would be a great goal here...

Only if you assume that the US reduces their emissions by going back to a rural lifestyle. Instead the US could replace fossil fuels with renewables and keep their wealth.

We are going to be incredibly poor anyway if we can't reduce emissions.

That wealth is not yours.

If we (developed nations) could all lower our per capita carbon footprints to the levels of China, or even better India, we'd all be doing much better wouldn't we?

https://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country...

China's carbon per PPP-GDP is about twice as bad as most developed countries, so you're either proposing making everyone poor, or making everyone's economy more carbon inefficient. Either way the answer is "no."

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...

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