Unequal consumption lies at the heart of the climate crisis

- Use one Paris-NYC flight per year,

- OR eat meat,

- OR heat their home,

- OR drive to work.

Choose one. All EU calculations about emissions are based on this target, but it’s too early to tell people. It’s based on: Earth absorbs 3 gigatons-equivalent-carbon by night, so we can emit as much. And that’s what humanity emitted in 1990, so it’s achievable. Since then, we’ve double or trippled.

For myself, I consider that the only flaw in this reasoning is that dividing the global permissible emissions by population “is communism”, because it assumes that every human should be given the same pay. I consider it’s normal that some earn much more. That’s the only flaw, and that’s because I’m a capitalist, but it’s great to have the ballpark figure of what would be FAIR to consume for everyone.

(I also have doubts about scientists’ reliability when topics are heavily politicized, but that’s my affair, at least I’m repeating their conclusions as-is, so you can judge).

100,000 commercial flights, all over the world, every day of the year add up to about 2% of total emissions.

The 40% of the global electricity generated for the past several decades from those dirty coal power plants that no one wants to live near seem like a better place to start.

In addition to all that pollution, there’s quite a bit of CO2

This is what happens when you read statistics wrong coupled with some preexisting bias that show in your choice of words.

And while 2021 and 2022 are seeing a drop ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-se... ) there is every indication that it will pick right back up and accelerate.

> Even as China’s coal demand is falling, the output from domestic coal mines is increasing rapidly. This resulted in a major overall drop in coal imports in the first quarter of the year, as reported by China Customs, and allowed coal plants and other operators to fill up stockpiles that were depleted during last year’s coal shortage.

> Investment in new coal- and gas-fired power capacity is also continuing at a high level. In the first four months of the year, at least 18 thermal power projects started construction, with a total capacity of 12.8 gigawatts (GW). Another 19 projects with a total capacity of 13.0GW were approved for construction.

Perhaps the most egregious example was the liberal coding of vaccination during the pandemic, with the self-fulfilling prophecy that vaccine skepticism is for the other tribe of people who are bad.

You had people with preexisting conditions terrified of making a private medical decision because of the extreme political coding that both sides egged on to hysterical extremes.

Look at Europe right now, having pursued ESG policies their economy and industry is becoming much weaker than US and China. What if US and China don't care about carbon footprint? They win, Europe loses. Same with wealthy vs middle class etc. Too much incentive not to subscribe to energy policy of "less" and "weakness".

This isn't what is happening. When you see injustice, it's a natural human impulse to get mad and start ascribing blame to particular individuals. It isn't people dishonestly using "just another political cudgel". It's people getting mad, as people have always done, and personalizing things.

That being said, yes, we don't have time for normal human psychology, though normal human psychology is what got us into and keeps us in this mess. Just as it's normal for people to get mad at other people, it's normal for the people accused to get defensive and deny or invert responsibility. "You don't really care! You're just trying to score points! Al Gore is fat and flies on planes!" Both sides are reacting normally, predictably, in counter-productive ways, like the various Palestinian liberation fronts in "The Life of Brian" killing each other in the sewers while the Romans look on in bemusement.

The rich can be led to believe that reducing consumption is an elite status symbol, and an opportunity for posturing among their rich friends.

Though rich people will always consume more energy than poor people, there have been promising shifts, such as the rich competing to own the latest efficient electric car instead of competing to own the most fuel inefficient sports car.

One could as easily frame climate change as a problem caused by the global south industrializing and achieving higher living standards, leaving larger carbon footprints.

I'm not a republican. I'm a proponent of science, technology, and climate journalism that focuses on education instead of polarization.

If you are implying that the market has reduced emissions in developped countries, i believe you're reading the situation wrong: China has become the world's factory, and its emissions have exploded, but the products manufactures are exported and consumed in the most developped countries. So effectively, developped countries emissions have grown. It's trivial to understand this when you observe the explosion of goods and services available in these countries, at the press of a button. There was never in history that many objects around us, in developped countries. Our footprint on the global world is growing rapidly and has never decreased.

The market is failing to deal with climate change because the environment costs (sometimes called externalities) are not part of the market dynamics. The market uses money, but has a blind eye to anything physical. Business is just money and human labor. No mines, no pollution. It's all dollars. Polluting a lake is a X million dollars fee, not an irreversible loss in a one-time resource.

To demonstrate, add some countries like Qatar, Montenegro, and Kuwait to that graph.

"Hey, give up something you love to save the planet"

and now I can say:

"Hey, get solar panels and then you can blast your A/C this summer for free!"

It's ultimately a consequence of human progress that we face such population problem. A more reasonable approach towards this would be to share lands and resources and spread people out a bit. But that's a whole different problem and the first world would rather have policies to increase their own population size than immigrate people into their lands.

In reality, these seem like a fancy and pedantic way to avoid saying “I am willing to leverage both my wealth and the looming threat of the deaths of poor people from climate change to secure the fealty and deference to my feelings that my status entitles me to.”

Also it's a manifestation of utilitaristic induced psychopathy, of course.

That's precisely how the Stalin/Mao/Hitlers types are fabricated.