Hacker News Reader

Comment by spazrunaway | Hacker News Reader

What can the United States really do? They produce 15% of global CO2 emissions. China produces 30%, and is building new coal plants every year. Its coal consumption has tripled since 2000. Aside from Japan, Russia, and India, no other single nation produces more than 5% of the total. The entire EU produces 9%.

Even if the U.S. and the EU immediately stopped emitting 100% of their CO2, would it have any real effect on climate change? China would make up the difference within a decade or two. The entire continent of Africa is ready to industrialize, and its population is projected to decuple to 10 billion by 2050.

I don't blame people for being skeptical of the idea that America investing in green energy will save the world. It's a drop in the bucket.

View on HN

The US and the EU are some of the biggest consumer markets. If they for example implement a carbon price and levy import tariffs for imports from countries who don't this will have a big effect.

That would be more us versus them. China isn't worse than we (Europe and US) when we were "growing up". The fair choice would be giving benefits to wares made with green energy, not taxing wares. China didn't get the planets pollution where it is now. We did.

During the industrial revolution in the west there were no alternatives. The story is different today.

I don't see a difference between taxing CO2 and giving benefits to CO2 free products.

Yes but the alternatives are much easier for a country to afford, understand and build when at a lower tech level (like China compared to the US when old powerplants were build in China for example).

The difference is that taxing something means less people are likely to buy it and when they do we make money, while giving a tax break make the product more competitive while costing us the income we might have had. One is a carrot, the other is a stick. It might not matter on income in the end but it will help push for greener products while taking the high road.

Giving a tax break needs to by financed by raising some other tax or printing more money, which causes inflation. There is no free lunch.

You could prevent a lot more pollution with the same amount of money if the money goes to low hanging fruits in countries with older power infrastructure than trying to tweak something brand new. You don't need to use extra money, just use it smarter. There're lots of ways to finance this smarter if trade wars and nationalism wasn't the top priorities.

Kurzgesagt has a good video called "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It?":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVxxxqwBQw

There are multiple view points. The country with the largest current annual total emissions is China with 27-30% and the US with 15% (see 2m10s).

The country that produced the most CO2 in total historically which got us to this point of climate change (see 3m30s), were US first at 25% of historical emissions, and the EU in second at 22%, and China in third with 13% of historical emissions. India, all of Africa, and all of South America each had 3% of historical emissions.

Then there's per capita emissions (see 5m10s of the video).

So which of these three metrics should be used? Or should it be some other metric or a combination?

Also probably worth noting that China seems to have peaked in coal plants. They've built too many already, but hopefully it should be going down now.

For example, the US could start to reduce their emission to the level of the EU on a per-capita basis. A 7% reduction in total emissions is not little. If you look at the population, it's expected that China will pollute ~4 times as much as the US.

You state the United States is producing 15% of global CO2 emissions - but that presumably ignores all the CO2 produced on the behalf of the United States in producing the products we import. Including those imports makes our CO2 emissions jump significantly higher - which is really bad seeing as how the United States has only 5% of the world's population. So even discounting imports the United States has the opportunity to reduce its CO2 emissions by 66%. How we achieve that can be a model for others to follow. I'd much rather be in a position of do as I do rather than do as I say.

Don't forget to subtract CO2 for all the goods/services we export. It's only fair if you count imports!

The US and EU are the big end customers for Chinese goods - Western economies shipped off the pollution from manufacturing, so it's not as straightforward as "its China's fault"

From this I get the impression that...

- Manufacturing in the states/EU where pollutant levels can be regulated is a good idea.

- Reducing consumerism as a culture would be useful.

Both of these go against trends (many in technology). Less consumerism means less stuff which is something wall street and SV are both pushing for. Moving to a service economy has been classified as a higher level than one with manufacturing. In the gamification metrics it would be to go backward.

The trick is to start 30 years ago, when everybody knew that climate change was real and serious. Then the US can join with other countries to implement any of a variety of carbon control measures, such as a carbon tax. With a worldwide consensus, it would be much more difficult for China to grow its carbon production so rapidly (and for Western countries to outsource all of their carbon-producing activities to China).

Of course, that involves not having spent three decades inculcating paranoid conspiracy theories in the American public. Instead, we can move on to stage 5 climate denialism, "Well, it's too late to do anything about it now".

Have you heard of diplomacy?

Maybe US could use it.

They could lead by example like EU tries.

Instead US decided leaving Paris agreement that was not even a binding agreement was the best idea.

How can the US lead countries like China to make change?

If you look at the history of pollution it isn't until recently that China started being a polluter on par with Europe and the US when we were growing our industry. Most of the pollution on earth hasn't come from China and if we acknowledge this and take our part in cleaning up, instead of pointing fingers and saying "today we are polluting less so you should too", we could for example lower import taxes on items made with green energy and lower export prices on things China need for going green(er).

China are not going to pay for fixing our pollution going back a hundred years. We are or China will just turn a deaf ear on our talk.

This response doesn't answer the question asked.

China is increasing their pollution. The issue is around leadership. How can the US lead China to lower pollution levels, something they are currently increasing?

The question on how to lead them doesn't point fingers. It doesn't ask China to cleanup any past mess done by others. Bringing this up avoids dealing with the very difficult issue of... how do outside parties lead China to be more environmentally friendly when they are increasingly going in the opposite direction.

Let me ask you this: If in scenario A the US (or EU) uses X billion dollars to lower pollution by tweaking an already high tech industry or in scenario B uses the same amount of money helping China getting their older technologies upgraded, which scenario do you think lowers the pollution the most?

If I could donate money and remove X amount of CO2 pollution from the US or X+10% from China with the same amount I would not care at all about national borders. Pollution doesn't. Nationalism does. Technology transfer for greener technology at a discount would help a lot more than trying to get some newer SUVs on the road in the States.

Btw. stating that China is "increasingly going in the opposite direction" is not fairly stating the situation. China is doing a lot better than most in many areas if you compare apples to apples. The main drive for the increase is the increase of people having access to something akin to what we have (smartphones, cars, etc). That a population being lifted out of poverty is polluting more than earlier isn't a surprise. They pollut more because they need more powerplants, more cars are on the road, etc. Not because the don't try to build efficient powerplants and don't try to tax old dirty cars.

China isn't doing worse than Europe and US when they were "growing up" as China is now. Asking China to do better than we did because we have polluted the earth without helping China out is unfair and China likely (and rightly) won't listen. So to answer your question: The US and the EU can do our part which is to help clean up (even if that help is to help China polute less) instead of pointing fingers or start trade wars. Carrots work a lot better than whips. AFAIK the EU does more carrot than whip which gives me some hope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com