https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/mexico-coal-fo...
While the Western industrialized countries are starting to make modest progress in fighting climate change, this is not happening in much of the third world.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India#El...
Nothing we're doing will matter if the rest of the world keeps dumping carbon into the atmosphere.
Nobody will admit this. We're just posturing here. We can't tell these economies to turn green (it doesn't make sense for them to!), yet we're not pouring in money to help fix the structural blockers.
We need to put manufacturing, finance, resources, education, and more into developing economies. It's a win-win. Developed nations can benefit from cheap labor while developing nations catch up and get an influx of export activity that spurs their growth.
Eventually we'll all reach economic parity and can find consensus on this problem.
A wealthy and prosperous nation doesn't want coal and can afford the cost of switching to alternatives.
It's a wee hard sell to locals in developed nation. Hey, let's move jobs abroad and lets use our resources to prop up other nations. What is left back home? Why bother paying taxes if objective is far away and and far in the future.
A) be poor now
versus
B) maybe face the collapse of global civilization in 40 years.
They'll chose B) everytime.
Why do you think that a lot of people want "small government"? The state/government is by definition in those "commons".
Regarding examples, they're countless. Think of petty tyrants fighting over the remains of the Byzantine Empire just as about the Ottomans were about to conquer it. Almost every falling empire had this behavior going on, selfish people "getting theirs" just before the fall.
It's human nature, unfortunately.
I love evolution of USSR for this reason. First the masses took down Tsarist regime to take property of the rich. Then masses took down Soviet regime to privatise the property. Both events happened because life was shit and people were looking for a quick way to live better.
> "The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all [on what becomes law]."
But because the government/state is ill-defined and shared, it can be abused and it's much harder to do anything about it.
Private property is selfish but efficient and clearly separated from the rest (in general) while public property is altruistic, not that efficient and generally not that well delineated from the rest.
Do you have any arguments to believe in the other option?
When in reality it's "be poor now (and likely to face the collapse of global civilisation and ecological crisis is still in roadmap) or maybe your grandkids will face the ecological crisis".
BTW, your suggestion that my post in any way represents or resembles a call for ethnic cleansing is in extremely poor taste and bad faith. Stop putting words in my mouth.
The problem is not that collapse isn't certain. The problem is that solution is iffy to say the least. So it's one possibly bad outcome vs another possibly bad outcome. On top of that, one out come may come much faster than the other.
However, assuming it is coming, what is the solution? Besides "stop pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere," I just don't see one. And, doing that is going to lower a lot of peoples' standards of living, i.e. make them poor.
Solution is "stop pumping greenhouse misions and consuming so much crap shipped all around the world". But developed countries paying off developing countries won't bring us to that solution.
The world as a whole has to consume much much less, yesterday. Developed countries can start by bringing manufacturing and agriculture back home. This will increase costs and lower consumption.
If a foreign nation runs a trade surplus and the US runs a trade deficit as a result, that means that spending by foreigners is smaller than their income, in other words, foreigners are saving money which they can invest in the USA. If they invest then the money flowing outside the US will also flow back to the US.
The Chinese buy US treasury bonds, that is where most of the USD China receives eventually end up. The government can issue debt to tap into the savings and invest them on behalf of the people buying treasury bonds. The investment will create new jobs and hopefully a return over the long term that beats inflation.
Of course the assumption was that the money is being invested. From what I have seen Donald Trump merely used the low yields on the treasury bonds to cut taxes for the rich. This will increase the corporate savings rate at the expense of the household savings rate. It's entirely possible that the additional savings end up in treasury bonds again and we are stuck in a loop.
It’d create good jobs for developed nations workforce that gets sent to build the facilities. It’d create low cost green energy in the developing world. Not to mention tons of new economic activity in the area these get built to serve the foreigners coming in to build the plants.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-enviro...
14% China's emissions can be directly attributed to Chinese exports. The domestic economy is a much bigger source of pollution, unless of course you consider the entirety of China a western colony that only exists to export products to the west. I consider the latter option untenable.
Of course they will pollute more.
Also, they're not exactly a democracy so people don't have much of a choice anyway. I'm pretty sure they're not exactly happy either. (last time I visited I had a coughing fit in shanghai and the sky was gray-ish)
> A wealthy and prosperous nation doesn't want coal and can afford the cost of switching to alternatives.
AFAICT, China is a wealthy and prosperous nation, and by nation we mean the state, but the same cannot be said for the people. I could be wrong but that's how I see things through media. If that's correct, then it means that there are just too many people and even China still cannot afford to use clean energy for all.
The elephant in the room has to be mentioned too: They are producing for the rest of the world, enabling the west not to look like an environmental disaster.
More seriously, while China has been slowly cleaning up its act, India is still steadily getting worse. 15 of the world's top 20 most polluted cities are now in India, with Pakistan and Bangladesh accounting for 3 more, and only 2 in China:
https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-cities
Caveat: the definition of "city" is a bit debatable here, with most of those 15 actually a part of greater Delhi's urban sprawl. But it's notable that none of China's megacities make it into the top 50, with the top offenders being primarily remote centers of heavy industry.
I don't see any good argument why we should give explicit permission to do harm on a global level. We can and should acknowledge that a lack of education, healthcare, stable economies, freedom, and economic mobility are contributing factors for pollution.