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Comment by michaelwww | Hacker News Reader

> It feels wrong to be happy

I think this is a common problem. Some of us sometimes feel guilty for being happy.

> the shit (that we threw) hits the fan

I'm not sure anyone is to blame because no one created human civilizations except all of us. My view is aligned with the human potential movement. As I understand it, we need a lot more work to overcome our tendencies towards what Catholics call the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. We are over-coming our primitive animal nature to something more intelligent and refined. Buddhists among others have a lot to say about letting our troublesome thoughts and emotions go and focusing on our resting nature. I like the Kundalini model for a nice way to visualize our human potential.

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

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> I'm not sure anyone is to blame because no one created human civilizations except all of us.

The West generally, and US specifically, tends to release much more carbon into the atmosphere than the countries that will suffer the most from climate change. The US further uses a lot more energy per capita than just about anyone else (in the Top 5?) in day-to-day life.

Most other industrialized countries can achieve the same level of comfort and lifestyle as the US with much less energy use.

> My view is aligned with the human potential movement

And yet, it's largely the global north, and America in specific - a small subset of humanity - who will escape the reaping, even though they did a disproportionate amount of sowing, to keep the Catholic thread going I guess.

> Some of us sometimes feel guilty for being happy

That's not what they said. They said they feel guilty for being happy that others will suffer immensely while they get to skate relatively unharmed. I agree that some folks do feel unnecessarily guilty sometimes, but I don't think that applies here.

> And yet, it's largely the global north, and America in specific

Are you blaming Americans for China's environmental destruction because we buy their products? Americans have created systems that protect the environment that China could take advantage of

> They said they feel guilty for being happy that others will suffer immensely while they get to skate relatively unharmed

I can't do anymore than I am doing to correct wrongs. I'm not mad at the English currently alive because their ancestors starved my Irish ancestors and I don't feel guilty that some of my ancestors might have owned slaves. I want to be happy, but weirdly some people don't and are always finding reasons to be unhappy.

“I have noticed that a man is usually about as happy as he has made up his mind to be.”

- Abraham Lincoln

Look at the CO2 chart in the link above, China only recently became the biggest emitter and even then they make up maybe a quarter of CO2 emissions.

The vast majority of emissions and environmental destruction has been done by the global north, only recently has the rest of the world started to become the majority in this sense. You can’t just point the finger and forget all of history up to this point.

China is part of the global North. Beijing is located at 40 °N latitude.

I’m not sure if you’re just unfamiliar but, no, China is not part of the global north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South?...

That's such a ridiculous definition as to be utterly useless for any real analysis. North Korea is "South" and South Korea is "North". Got it.

I can't believe anyone would take this stuff seriously. But I'm sure it's popular with the officious busybodies in some international NGOs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can see how it’s confusing, but it’s a fairly well understood term by people within geopolitical circles. Unless you believe latitude is the most important explanatory variable in geopolitics, I don’t think the edge cases are such a big deal as to prevent us from using global north/south as a shorthand.

> Are you blaming Americans for China's environmental destruction because we buy their products? Americans have created systems that protect the environment that China could take advantage of

Some of the systems may make products expensive, and the whole point of offshoring production to China (from the US and other places), so to make them inexpensively. Are consumers willing to start paying the externalities of climate change in their products (regardless of where they are produced)?

And as Kurzgesagt points out in "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It?", while China as a whole releases the most, per capita each citizen is relatively low(er) emissions (especially compared to the US). Further, the country with highest cumulatively/historically released carbon to date—which has led us to the climate change problem in the first place—is the US:

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

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