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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

People worldwide need education, healthcare, stable economies, freedom, and economic mobility. We have to solve so many other problems in the world before clean energy really works.

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.

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We already tried this. After 40 years of this policy towards China, China is an environmental disaster and burns more coal than the all of the rest of the world combined.

Not per capita, though

Chinese citizens emit more CO2 per capita than citizens from the EU, and since 2013.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-enviro...

How much of the CO2 per capita that China emits goes into making products for EU/US citizens? Is that factored in?

Probably not. We want to feel good about ourselves, so we twist the numbers in our favor and can point at China as a "reason" not to change anything here.

I really hate to write this, but this is outsourced CO2 from EU. EU manufacturing is dead. I look at my home office around me - everything is made in China. Some pieces of furniture are EU made, but the rest - made in China things. Old Tektronix scope is “made in USA”, but it is really old.

Old numbers from the top of my head:

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.

not exactly, US outsourced polluting manufacturing to China and anything that could be done cheaper there through less regulations.

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)

Environmental regulations, like air quality, water treatment is a lot tougher these days. Air and water quality has been improving for the past 7 years. These days a lot of people are giving approvals for increase environmental quality, though much work has to be done. I feel people outside don't understand how china's political system works at all. We support democracy, it's just that we think there could be different governance structures to achieve democracy and more effective governance. A lot of people, like environmental scientists, are in position of power to make changes to regulations and policy. At the same time, we are doing things to mitigate negatives of climate regulations such as increasing hassle, more costs to businesses and so on that climate regulations deniers use as excuses. It's very comprehensive.

Where I'm from used to be communist... I have a good idea how it works... There's a way the country presents itself to its people and outside and the reality is most often very different.

In the comment you replied to, it says

> 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.

India: Hold my beer

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.

China produces more things than the rest of the world. It is super easy to stop them, just stop buying anything they produce.

.. or economical parity will mean that West becomes poorer to match the rest of the world. And then nobody will care about pollution.

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.

Would you rather be poor or face the collapse of global civilization?

For most people it's:

A) be poor now

versus

B) maybe face the collapse of global civilization in 40 years.

They'll chose B) everytime.

Do you have any historical examples of this? As I believe in opposite.

Tragedy of the commons is a thing for a reason.

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.

And new regime is usually coming to get rich fast, not fight for a noble goal achievable in 100 years. Even if leaders are naive idealists, usually the masses get behind them for a quick buck.

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 government isn't really part of "the commons" at all:

> "The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all [on what becomes law]."

https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem/

It is of the commons. That's the problem. If the government were pmiller2's property, nobody could take it over, you'd defend it.

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.

Our government has more characteristics of private property than the commons, then.

Take a look at any (r)evolution. Pretty much every time people took "get rich soon" over hippy paradise. French revolution, Soviet revolution, Dissolution of USSR, Hitler coming to power...

Do you have any arguments to believe in the other option?

Now that's a good fear mongering propaganda :) Destroy the bourgeois or face the eternal hunger and enslavement! Get rid of {insert your preferred ethnicity} or face the downfall of the nation!

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".

So, because collapse isn't certain, you'd rather stuff cotton in your ears, cover your eyes and yell "lalalala can't hear you?"

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.

Not ethnic cleansing. Just a regular regime that pushes through using emotional calls.

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.

There's plenty of good research out there showing that global civilization will collapse before the end of the century given the amount of warming we're on track for. You should read it.

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.

I did read it and IMO it's emotionalised bullshit. Few cities may be vacated, few major seaside cities will solve it with expensive technological installations. But it certainly won't be {insert your favourite dystopian movie} style collapse.

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.

It doesn't work this way from a macroeconomic perspective.

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.

If they invest in the US :) But why would they invest in US if developed world is focusing on propping up the developing nations?

We do not grant people permission to cause harm on a national level just because there is a lack of social economic factors like education, health, economy, freedom, and mobility. It is acknowledge that those factors play a part in why people do harm, and providing social support reduces the overall rate of harm, but we still have laws that forbid harm.

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.

Developed countries could pay to build nuclear power in the developing world. Terms being that the foreign country paying has 100% autonomy to build and operate the plants for their lifetime.

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.

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