Comment by barnacled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barnacled | Hacker News Reader

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>Are these not mostly proxy emissions for western countries? E.g. is it the case that people in these countries are emitting pollution due to their lifestyles, or is the pollution mostly from energy, transport and manufacturing in the pursuit of selling products to western countries?

Good point but I think much of it could also be attributed to countries going through their own industrialisation processes and generating wealth (however that end product gets used). Are we to condemn them all to poverty? Much of China is still rather impoverished.

Also - are you suggesting we should shut down our economies in order that we don't produce anything in China for example? If not then _how_ they produce the power/do industry is in their hands not ours and it's an issue to address.

The big issue in China is the CCP have no reason to care or abide by any global rules on this (or follow the example of any goody 2-shoes western country). They have endless coal plants with very little CO2 mitigation and the corrupt/totalitarian nature of their govt makes it very difficult to have them improve on this.

>Is there any evidence of deaths attributable to shut downs so far? There’s over a million deaths worldwide due to covid, how many attributable to non-covid causes? E.g. suicide etc. There's a strong correlation between economic strife and deaths. I'm not going to get into the missed medical appointments etc. as that is not relevant here but that's a covid factor too.

>> but I think much of it could also be attributed to countries going through their own industrialisation processes

Is that not just a misconception about how countries develop though?

See Andrew McAfee - More from Less.

E.g. we know that as a country’s manufacturing capability matures, it produces more product with less raw material and energy inputs. It’s somewhat counter intuitive though but the end result is the opposite of what you suggest - maturation of industry reduces emissions and reduces raw material consumption and it can be to such an extent that the amount of product produced increases- example, motor industry of America or Japan, example battery production industry of china. Raw material consumption and energy use went down, manufactured product went up. Andrew McAfee’s book has better examples than mine but these were the ones i looked into to try to disprove his argument.

>> The big issue in China is the CCP have no reason to care or abide by any global rules on this

Wait, the US emissions of co2 per capita is just over 16tonnes per year. Why is China who’s per capita emissions at just under 7tonnes per year the key to moving forward? The key is america but the political approach is always to use the metric of convenience- currently that is absolute volume since that paints china worse than the US, and yet it would be only fair that we adjust for population.

>> There's a strong correlation between economic strife and deaths

Sure, but can we quantify it? We need to figure out if we’re over-prioritising covid response. E.g. if there were 1mm excess deaths and only 25% were attributable to covid, that sounds like the cure is worse than the disease.

As it stands though, it appears almost 100% of excess deaths are attributable to covid, that suggests we need to keep focussing on preventing covid deaths rather than focussing on death ultimately caused by economic harm, correct?

RE: Chinese GDP Chinese GDP is probably not a great measure as a large % of the population are still very poor and have therefore very low consumption. In order for a larger amount of people to transition into the middle class would start matching and likely exceeding other country's GDP CO2 emissions.

RE: economic impact People have in fact quantified it but it's a big topic as you can imagine. I don't think it's hugely controversial to suggest that poverty results in poor health and the data is clear that poor countries tend to have significantly lower life expectancy and higher poor health outcomes.

I'm not going to digress into covid as that's a whole other conversation :)

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