Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

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The US has a large per capita CO2 footprint that could be significantly reduced, but CO2 production is correlated with GDP and the US has a significantly higher GDP per capita than Europe. Countries that produce more per capita also use more energy per capita on average, which makes sense.

Transportation in the US will have a larger CO2 footprint than other countries for a very long time simply by virtue of size and geographic population dispersion. Similarly, the vast herds of ungulates aren't going away no matter what we do with agriculture, it is a critical and natural part of the North American ecosystem.

What constitutes a reasonable CO2 footprint per capita has a significant dependency on local conditions. Some regions have intrinsically higher CO2 footprints than others, ceterus paribus. In a world where everyone is trying to optimize for CO2 footprint (not the case today), a fair result will still have large differences across regions.

Europe has shown in recent years that GDP growth can get decoupled from CO2 [1]. Also, it‘s not that the big emittors are poor countries - in the light of long-term survival, on could deal with lower GDPs than what many countries have today. It‘s just a matter of priorities.

[1] eg https://qz.com/791865/climate-change-charting-the-extraordin...

> Similarly, the vast herds of ungulates aren't going away no matter what we do with agriculture, it is a critical and natural part of the North American ecosystem.

You don’t mean the 95 million cattle of the US meat and milk industry? Those are very unnatural, and a significant contribution to AGW.

North America had 60 million bison before they were replaced with cattle. The necessity of having vast herds of large ungulates in western North America to prevent ecosystem collapse is well understood. If we stopped raising cattle, we'd have to replace them with bison, which have a similar footprint.

It may be a smaller herd, but it will be a very large herd nonetheless. That aside, at no point in the foreseeable future will people stop eating meat and dairy, so total elimination is a bit of a moot point.

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