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Comment by netrus | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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).

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