Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds

theguardian.com

28 pointsRustan23 comments

In the dawn of the web, one of my favorite websites was despair.com.

I laughed at the sarcastic cynicism and sendups of corporate culture.

Then they rocked my world with a poster of a drop of water falling into a larger body of water with the text: "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood" and the title "Irresponsibility".

Still available apparently, with the base idea being clearly more true than ever.

The problem is group actions require group solutions. I can go vegetarian and live a zero impact life, but the flood will still come unless we invest in mitigation and infrastructure.

Source paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

I think our society needs to revisit ideas about not just collective responsibility, but collective guilt. Any one of us struggles to see living our normal carbon-intensive lives as an act of violence, but the consequences are nevertheless deadly. We've understood many of the impacts of our behavior for decades, but our carbon intensive activities only intensified.

At what point can we talk about collective guilt, and appropriate measures of a justice system? At what point do we say that, like PG&E killed a couple of towns, that a larger collective like a country or group of countries has killed people?

Clearly my take is unpopular, but the alternative is that we continue to kill with impunity so long as we do it through sufficiently diffuse means?

Together with wealth inequality we are seeing environmental inequality.

Perhaps history will remember the "First Environmental War" after WW1 and WW2.

> the alternative is that we continue to kill with impunity

Who did you kill recently? I did not kill anyone but you must have given your statement.

No, I do not think that you killed anyone. The type of hyperbole used in both this piece as well as in reactions like yours only serve to polarise the issue without offering any upsides. The alternative to this type of hyperbole is to change yourself instead of trying to change others. Aim to find enjoyment into becoming less dependent on those things which you deem to be bad or harmful - whatever these might be - without proselytising your newfound purpose in life. If you're successful it will rub off on others in a far more effective way than by you trying to force your way upon them for the greater good. Walk the walk, don't talk the talk. Only once people ask how you managed to walk that far the time has come to do some talking to help them find their way.

Collective guilt is frequently a chief rationale behind mass killings. That includes six million dead in the Holocaust, three million in Kampuchea, another three million in the Holodomor, estimates of up to sixty million in China's Great Leap Forward. Unfortunately the list goes on and on. I think this makes a good argument that collective guilt is possibly the most evil, unjust concept humanity has ever invented. Playing with fire doesn't describe it, it's more like playing with a supercritical lump of plutonium.

I didn't choose to bring up the holocaust, but I was thinking more about the other side of it. Many did feel that all Germans were guilty, even those who weren't specifically employed in the military. But it was recognized that actually holding many parties responsible was infeasible, so the trials at Nuremberg were only for the very most prominent. For some time the US tried to make German civilians in their zones watch films showing the atrocities, but many people refused to even look at the screen.

In my age group of Germans (born 1966) it's basically dogma that our generation is responsible for studying the Holocaust (movies, literature, art in addition to documentaries, etc.) and then turning around and preventing it from happening again. For the most part I think it's been a success but it backfired with a small but steady percentage of people. In addition, Germans can come across as sanctimonious when picking who their favored victim group is, often being accused as being antisemitic when siding with Palestinians, for example.

The other problem was that the discussion basically happened in a vacuum, hardly any of us interacted with Jews. Since I emigrated to the US I've had more productive conversations with actual victims, or rather their children.

This is nonsense of course but say it wasn't. Wouldn't it also be true that the collective actions of Americans also save lives? The real idiocy is of course trying to divine who exactly gets the blame for any particular molecule of CO2 - is it Exxon that pumps it out of the ground or is it the person whose foot pushes down the gas pedal? Or is it any of the intermediaries in between the two of them?

Carbon emissions per death? The imperial system has gone too far.

are Americans producing the most emissions per person? I bet no - so why Americans are singled out?

Among countries with big population numbers, US has among the highest rate of energy use and pollution per person, and by far.

I think that's not true. Qatar leads the list (and Kuwait, Oman, UAE are also up there), and countries like Canada, Australia are also ahead of the US (I imagine in part b/c of heating and cooling?).

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Source? US looks to be #2 on overall CO2 emissions (China is double what US outputs), if you sort by per capita (per person), US is not the top by far (16th): https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

No, you have to take in account energy usage and pollution attributed to the consumer of at the end of the production chain.

E.g. if you import a phone from China you have to account for the energy usage and pollution as yours.

Do you have a reference to a list which does that calculation?

All the other states at the to of that carbon per capita list also seem like they're highly dependent on imports, possibly more than the US, so I'd expect that many of the factors you describe also apply to them. The gulf states also have to get their phones from abroad.

That basically blames US consumers for Chinese policy and environmental practices - how is a US consumer going to force China to stop using coal powerplants?

The choice/substitution argument doesn’t work when there are no practical alternatives. This is why climate change and pollution are not individual choices, but a global imperative. Anything short of global coordinated action to mitigate won’t work (and won’t be enough). What individuals can do is put pressure on their officials and buy sensibly when choice is there.

> That basically blames US consumers for Chinese policy

Not at all, this is not personal consumer's choice. Consumers can only make efforts to fight consumerism and push for political change.

This is more a question for google than HN in my opinion.

Whether it’s the most depends how you count and there are usually small countries that come in higher.

But US is always near the top in the lists.

I think it's because some Nations with higher per-capita emmissions (like Qatar) are teensy and can't do much about their heavy outputs (desalination, aircon take a lot of energy). The US is huge, is visible on the top per-capita list and is also the 2nd largest emitter overall. Given that the US is a first world economy, is extremely consumerist and has a love affair with gas-guzzling cars, it's likely that by simply making better choices, the US could likely cut more % per-capita than Qatar. And given their size, that would have impact on a global scale.

Americans are singled out because of two reasons: the fact that north-Americans [1] like the authors of this piece are incredibly north-America centred and consider north-America and northern-Americans the centre of the universe. Add to this the fact that self-flagellation is seen as a virtuous act in liberal western societies like those in the USA and Canada while criticising other countries and cultures is seen as offensive, especially when the criticism centres around those other cultures developing habits which the west is being criticised for - e.g. increased mobility, increased resource use. This is counterproductive since it exacerbates the problems caused by those habits - e.g. China building hundreds of coal-powered power stations - while it would have been possible to forestall this by developing viable [1] alternatives and making the technology available to those countries which do not have the resources to develop these by themselves.

[1] viable as in providing the same benefits while reducing or eliminating the negative aspects, e.g. nuclear instead of coal-fired power stations

Quick, get these three Americans in jail \s

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