[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).
In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.
That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.
> There is no other way.
That is not true. The other ways are:
1. Reduction of energy use per person.
2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction.
3. Using Energy sources which are low-carbon, but expensive and/or difficult to deploy.
of course your way makes it a lot _easier_, but since reduction of greenhouse gasses is necessary regardless of the availability of a convenient energy solution, these are also relevant, and gradually are becoming necessary.
By the way - (1.) is already progressing relatively well in lots and lots of countries.
No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.
The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.
Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.
Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you.
Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you.
Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...
It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.
The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.
Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?
It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.
In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.
Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.
Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.
Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.
More depth can explored using keywords like “global footprint” and “ecological footprint”. What’s your source (“last time I checked”)?
But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution.
Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.
"We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people?
As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we".
All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent.
Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont.
Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.
This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly.
(This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)
It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.
If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.
So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?
If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there.
If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.
So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.
I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries.
I just can't fucking believe what I just read.
Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.
Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.
It is unlikely there is political capital to make significant changes to reverse the damage.
Calling some countries a "risk" isn't a value judgement. It's pointing out that focusing on US, EU and China is looking at less than half of the picture.
Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?
At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
Natural self-regulation means hitting resource limits, followed by sudden and drastic mass dying off, through wars and starvation.
(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)
We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.
Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.
I believe this is a very dangerous misconception. In our globalized interconnected world nobody will be spared. "We" might suffer a little less then other parts of the world, but effect on "us" will still be huge.