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Comment by Morvan | Hacker News Reader

>This year's economic shutdowns have done little to reduce the world's carbon emissions.

This is misleading. 2020 saw a 7 percent drop from fossil emission levels in 2019 [1]. That is a huge number YoY which only exposed mass consumerism as the true culprit for the increase in CO2 emissions. Not to mention that China and India are the number one polluters and as usual the UN and other supranational organization will look the other way. Goes to show how our central planners are simultaneously waving the contradictory specters of global warming and deflationary economics.

[1] https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record...

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From previous discussions I've seen on pollution, but possibly not CO2 specifically, the global shipping industry is one of the bigger contributors. While we may have driven and flown less in the past year I'm pretty sure we didn't buy significantly less so there are still lots of ships out there.

Concrete production also takes a lot of energy. Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.

Even if everyone in the top global 1% was driving electric cars right now we'd still be contributing a lot to CO2 emissions in other ways.

>the global shipping industry is one of the bigger contributors

Well, what are they shipping? Goods that supply the consumerist chain at every level. We definitely did buy significantly less given that money velocity has plummeted in 2020, and I would argue this was reflected in the global shipping industry slowdown.

>Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.

Current costs reflect the reopening boom, not last year's slowdown which witnessed a commodity drawdown!

Maybe we should require that retail get 80% or more of their products from shipping locations that are in North America or the country of origin.

Globalization as always seems to cause a lot of major pains for the world. Global Warming, lower wages in the USA, legal sweat shops in other countries, etc...

> China and India are the number one polluters and as usual the UN and other supranational organization will look the other way

US: 16t per capita

China: 8t per capita

India: 2t per capita

I think it is pretty clear who is fucking things up right now. Yes, there are a lot of Indians, but that only means that the US (and their rich peers) have to move even further to stop being the bad guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I wrote pollution, e.g. what goes straight into the ocean [1,2] which is a good proxy for pollution at large, not carbon dioxide emission alone. I mentioned that in passing to illustrate the hypocrisy of the UN and other environmentally conscious organizations. CO2 is just one component, and if those organizations can't even get the rest right there is no reason to expect them to be consistent on that issue either. I hope this makes sense.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... [2] https://ibanplastic.com/top-10-most-polluted-rivers-in-the-w...

Per capita is meaningless, the Vatican could pollute more but only has 500 people. I do not trust calculations of hard to measure items like the CO2 footprint of an entire country (which could easily be an order of magnitude worse or better). In any case the effects are so far removed from the cause that many politicians and business leaders will simply ignore making any rational changes, since demanding change will affect them sooner (no votes or less money) rather than later (their grandchildren suffer, maybe the human race vanishes). Rational discussions are unlikely without immediate reaction (even then as in India with Covid an in your face nightmare can't motivate some people).

Even ignoring per capita numbers, India emits less CO2 in total than the United States. How could you possibly classify them as a bigger problem?

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