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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

The US (and EU) are largely deindustrialized, having offshored nearly all of their grossly polluting industries to the Global South and Asia. It doesn't feel particularly fair to point fingers at the developing world when we've externalized nearly all of our pollution onto them.

(That doesn't, of course, excuse China's coal-fired plant growth, or any other form of egregious pollution. Only to say that these things don't happen in a vacuum.)

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To call the US or EU deindustrialised is hilariously wrong. It manufactures more than ever before in its history. It's less polluting because it pays to process waste and designs processes to minimise waste, not because manufacturing is done elsewhere.

> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.

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

A common narrative but also wrong. Even when we take into account the externalized pollution the US and EU still have lower emissions compared to 30 years ago. 87 % of China’s emissions is caused by their own needs. 13 % for playing factory of the world. Asia has a lot of people, no surprise they pollute a lot.

this is a point that seems to be largely overlooked overall on the impact a specific country has on global emissions.

Overall, the US has a bigger impact than a country like Spain simply because you need to also factor in the supply chain emissions that come with it (in this case, a lot of it being generated somewhere else but being consumed in the US).

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