Why can it not be countries that don't care just using CFCs still?
The PCA is a joke that gives these countries essentially unlimited ability to continually move their own goalposts for "peak carbon", no real difficult sacrifices required for them until after they've reached that moving target.
China has been infamous for decades for not even having reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naïvety, irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma demanding ideological conformance?
The harsh reality nobody on the political left in the west has the courage to acknowledge that climate change is 100% out of the control of our WEIRD (wealthy, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries, and no amount of self flagellation over "climate racism", nor vicious hostility towards "climate change deniers", nor radical proposals to destroy the entire energy grid is going to make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket" difference in climate change. Climate dogma is the TSA to climate change's terrorism - wasteful, ineffective theatrical performance art that degrades everyone's quality of life while doing effectively nothing to address the actual problem, intended strictly to appease the neuroticism of the shmucks dumb enough to believe it makes a difference.
I get that this sounds pessimistic, cynical, and even a little misanthropic, but it's also what the actual data is telling us.
This isn't a fight we can win with the way things are done in China not changing. Totalitarian demands for ideological conformance present an impenetrable barrier for "real" progression of humanity in virtually every aspect in every country where they are practiced, including the climate change cult itself in the US.
By regulating what's available on markets here we can pressure maufacturers elsewhere.
What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.
That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either.
The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions.
I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions?
At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution.
Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not.
Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now.
These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first.
Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes.
Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.
Tens or hundreds of millions of people would die as a direct consequence of this economic malpractice, including a decent portion of the US citizens who voted for the persons responsible. Reelection would be tricky, although it would not be difficult to imagine the US democratic process being suspended as a reaction to the catastrophe (legal precedent is not relevant, see history).
Don't get me wrong: climate change is a problem! But this would create a much bigger and more acute problem.
If there were better "actual solutions", stupid moonshots wouldn't get funded in the first place. I don't think your framing of this situation is very accurate.
> stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions
I thought you didn't have any actual solutions and admitted as much?
These things appear to us a "pointless" and a waste of time because there are overriding economic principles we just don't want to touch, it is a willful pointlessness that is quite apparent in the big picture. It's not China, it's capitalism, (of which, granted, China is a huge agent within).
If we lived in a world where the problems were simply about the distribution itself of food and shelter and power, we could point to the complexity of the systems, and understand the risks of wrongheadedness in the face of them, but we live in a world plagued by bad faith and non-human incentives that certainly muddy these waters, but it doesn't mean there aren't some simple solutions to a few things people haven't thought of...
To create this dichotomy between the West and China is to deny the Anthropocene we are all in! One that is defined necessarily by the literally geological forces of a world-dominating economic order.
The work the west(and China) is doing to develop non-fossil fuel based tech cheap is directly applicable to those growing economies, and not a pointless waste of time.
The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be educated and act. This almost never happens unless the costs for not acting are built into the prices of goods. Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.
Agreed 100%.
>Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.
Also an astute observation. It may be the case that this is ultimately a problem with our political system first and foremost.
But economic sanctions alone will not halt the manufacturing base of an economy the size of China's.
China and India need to get on board for real. Asking politely is not working. I'll never advocate for the initiation of force, but something is going to need to change in a big way to convince these countries to join us in a fight that will strip all of us of a little short-term prosperity, if we want to leave a planet that our great grandchildren can safely habitate.
The price ceilings should be set based on some amount of maximum profit margin companies should be allowed to make. If they want to make bigger margins they're going to have to move manufacturing to cleaner countries and then they can apply their insane markups.
It's an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.
Seems like a monumentally bad idea
> It’s an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.
I don’t think it closes any tax loopholes.
Why spend money shipping laptops to Bermuda so you can put a sticker on them there if you aren't saving any money?
1. There's a positive incentive here, if you work and live in country A and are considering working in country B either country B can craft their tax system so that you won't end up paying the same taxes to both country A or country B... or they can not do that. If they fail to make their tax law compatible they lose out on your tax income (it instead all goes to country A) since nobody wants to be double taxed - if they make their tax laws compatible then they essentially get some free income and another earner. Digital nomads pulling down six digit salaries in low cost of living countries also injects a whole lot of money into the local economy and generally just makes things better - and the country retains the right to limit visas if they ever have any issues with it.
Tax compatibility with VAT only is a sensible concept where the destination country has a VAT itself, which the US does not. Otherwise, a minimum VAT on imports is just a global punitive import tariff, and has nothing to do with compatibility.
Even where its sensible, it still has potential problems that can be introduced through other parts of the tax system, but…we don’t really need to consider that in this case.
To me the answer is a pretty easy one:
Take the CO2 emissions of a country and divide by its GDP. That gives you a CO2 per dollar. Then decide on a CO2 cost per unit for your country. Now apply that as a tariff per dollar of imports from said country.
It's imperfect, of course. But I think it is close enough to estimate what we want it to do.
The right doesn't even believe that climate change is real, they aren't participating in any fight.
This is historically more of a right-wing phenomenon in the US. Though I concede it is becoming stronger on the left in recent years, as their frustration boils over. Seems they've finally concluded that the right wing will never be coming to the table in good faith, so might as well fight fire with fire.
We're all losing.
We could compel China and other countries, by diplomatic and other means
>"The Syrian Arab Republic affirms that the practices of the United States of America and the illegal presence of its forces on parts of the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic is an actual embodiment of the crime of aggression," the Syrian Mission to the United Nations told Newsweek.
>"Syria stresses that the lies promoted by the U.S. administration are nothing but a failed attempt to justify the acts of aggression and the flagrant violation of the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic,"
https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-for...
The phrase “…the people of Syria…” is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
The current US lifestyle has CO2 emissions per person 2x that of the current Chinese lifestyle, and over 8x that of the current Indian lifestyle.
Total emissions from India is 1/2 US emissions and total from China is 2x US emissions, but switching to per country instead of per person doesn't really help because the US is the #2 emitter by country (we are #16 per capita).
Diplomatically convincing us that we need to have a lifestyle and standard of living that emits a fraction of the CO2 we currently do...
I think we agree..
Why so hostile?
Have you heard of our lord and savior Nuclear Fission? We should build a shitload of restores all over the place.
But yeah, looks like commercial fusion reactors are getting closer.
I can’t see fusion energy being a reality in my lifetime.
Bags blow in the wind and wind up all sorts of places.
Straws mostly wind up in proper trash streams.
Ban imports of goods made in ways that would have been illegal to do here.
Would destroy the economy in the short run, but it would eventually correct.
What do you think destroying the economy does?
Impose escalating tariffs on those items from any nation not meeting those goals.
We will buy less or they’ll be made more cleanly. Worst case making them in countries that make them cleanly eventually becomes profitable with the tariff protection.
Enjoy your life, for goodness sake don't have children and prepare for the collapse of civilisation in around 50 years or so.
> Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions until they do first.
The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but all that work is getting undone because China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Can't convince the others to do it if you don't do it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint in the west, I'm saying that doing that and hoping that other countries will voluntarily join us isn't working.
Yes.
Western shifts to less-harmful methods and materials increases the size of the market for those methods and materials and lowers their costs, spurring adoption in places not as rich as the West.
The early adoption of solar panels in the west drives production capacity in poorer nations that are more manufacturing-oriented. The increased production capacity increases supply, which lowers prices, which makes it more affordable for them to transition to solar (and other technologies).
International conventions, treaties, and agreements headed by richer nations bring along poorer nations.
In the US, harmful emissions like CO2 and GHG plateaued in the 70s and 80s and started declining on both a total and per-capita basis in the 2000s. They are still much, MUCH, higher than the rest of the world but are declining. In China and India emissions have started to slow their rate of increase or have plateaued in the last 10 years.
China went from ~5% of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear in 2000 to 15% in 2019. The US was at approximately 40% in 2020. Given the rates of change China will probably surpass the United States in renewable/nuclear generation as a percentage of their electricity generation in 10-20 years.
I would expect the emissions curves to mimic those of Europe and the United States, lagging by 30-40 years.
This is a decades-long effort, not something that can be realized in years. The infrastructure built 20 years ago still has 30 years left in it, so the targets we want to hit in 50 years need to be planned for and built today.
But as for your question "the strategy of doing it ourselves" isn't really valid.
Each individual American emits roughly 3x the amount of CO2 that a Chinese person does. We're not "doing it ourselves" we are barely sacrificing anything while expecting people poorer than us to do what we don't want to do.
https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Continen...
It's a similar story with leaded gasoline.
I'll never understand this argument. "Why should we care about our health if {insert poor country here} doesn't care about theirs"? It's just a convenient excuse to keep making the problem worse and worse. The correct solution here is to find the culprits and pressure them into complying with international goals, not just give up and turn the Earth into an inhospitable furnace.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-his...
On the other hand, China is also investing a furious amount of money into green tech, doing multiple moonshots at a time on this stuff. So when the world does start to enforce standards globally, they'll be in the winning position.
So in this era where nobody is putting in an earnest effort on climate change, they're winnning... and the day we switch over to caring and enforcing the rules globally, they'll keep on winning.
The US pollutes at roughly twice the amount on a per person basis as China. In addition we "outsource" some of our pollution to them by them doing our manufacturing.
It's tough to both raise the standard of living (reduce poverty) while also reducing pollution but China has a lot of initiatives to be more green; for examples 150 new nuclear reactors planned in the next 15 years. They benefit from the better air quality so it's a goal for them.
...
>China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global warming was not a concern
Pretty much, security enviroment has changed. So indigenous energy security = short/medium term coal is back until electrification proliferates.
Part of the solution is necessarily going to be temporary reductions in American energy consumption, writ large, until we can produce technology to sustainably remove carbon emissions from the environment at scale. I'm all-in, for instance, on banning SUVs and "light" trucks for personal ownership, which categorically require more energy input (regardless of whether gasoline, hydrogen, electric, etc) than sedans and compact cars - to say nothing of the pedestrian safety risks, no less.
Hell, I'm open to considering energy quotas for residential homes, to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold, to disincentive wasteful use of electricity.
These are all tiny steps in the right direction, and all insufficient alone, but our progress in saving the climate is a vector value, not a boolean value. A bunch of little improvements in the right direction do help, but we cannot accept them as a "complete" solution on their own.
What you're proposing is a dystopian police state where the government decides how warm or cold your house should be on any given day. Of course the rich will be able to just pay any fines to keep the power/gas on, so they can blast their AC all summer while the poor swelter or go into debt to pay fines, because their house unfortunately isn't built in the shade and gets hotter than the ones around it, so the government weather stations think their house is cooler than it actually is. Or the government will have to put thermostats in literally every house to accurately monitor internal temperature, and decide what's good enough for you.
Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government will assign you the number and type of foods you're limited to, namely the ones that produce the least carbon emissions to produce and with the caloric and nutritional profiles determined by the government to be ideal. Would cure obesity as a side effect!
Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft per person, any existing property with a footprint exceeding that number will be seized and turned into multi-family housing, with government-determined "fair" compensation to the existing property owner of course.
Both of those ideas follow the same priorities and rationale as your energy quotas.
Shit like that is the real reason why the second amendment exists. You're probably just wealthy enough that you assume you'd be among the ruling elite that maintains its personal freedom, or you really haven't thought these ideas through. I'm far less worried about climate change, something we can at least potentially adapt to at cost, than I am about rhetoric like this. It's akin to the Chinese Nationalists opening the Yellow River dam in 1938 in an attempt to slow the Japanese advance. The resulting flood killed between 400,000-900,000 civilians directly depending on who's counting, made millions more homeless, and ultimately did little to slow the Japanese advance. But I guess it was a "tiny step in the right direction" from a war-fighting perspective, right?
I'd much rather endure the effects of climate change than literally create a dystopian New World Order out of science fiction.
>Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government will assign you the number and type of foods you're limited to...
>Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft per person...
Spoiler: how rich you are already determines how warm/cold your house is allowed to be, and how large it's allowed to be, and the foods you're allowed to eat.
What these proposals are talking about is forcing people to live in poverty by government mandate to fight climate change. (So much for the war on poverty I guess, now poverty is the solution!) It's about putting a hard, government enforced ceiling on the level of prosperity one is allowed to earn, and making that ceiling lower than most peoples' current living standards. All so one individual nation can fight climate change, because there's no way the entire world is going to agree to this.
After centuries of democracy and prosperity, people will kill over that, and they would be right to. It's also ineffective and unnecessary. The amount of carbon saved would be offset by the massive internal security and enforcement departments needed to achieve any of this, and it would stifle innovation as the social/cultural motivations that encourage it in the populace are removed by government mandate. It would also kill the economy and consequently make governments poorer due to the loss in tax revenue.
I'm pretty left by American standards, but I believe in American founding principles. If that shit ever starts I'm going to be dealing in illegal wood-fired generators, and helping the more militant resistance properly encrypt/secure their communications until such time as the government is overthrown. But democracy still works here, so thankfully I can be confident enough that's never going to happen that I can post about it here.
Don't make me laugh.
I take it you've never actually needed to use these services? Because their 'availability' is increasingly unavailable due to bogus eligibility criteria, bureaucratic gridlock and delays, transport unavailability, etc.
The apparent presence of these services is just a pernicious lie pulled over the eyes of the well-off, in the same way that Law and Order and other 'cop-aganda' TV shows disarm their outrage about the justice system. The well-off are the only ones with the power to change the system, so (predictably) they're subject to extensive propaganda along these lines.
>Also the government doesn't directly dictate how much you eat or the precise temperature of your house.
Right. The economy is better because it generously gives you the choice of... heat or eat. Such luxury!
That distinction means you're just fine with it, apparently. So no doubt a government program that affords people the same luxurious choice should pass your muster, correct? :D
63% Japan
61% Germany
36% UK
30% Switzerland
> make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket"
These drops in a bucket are exponential. What did your mother teach you about exponentials?
> the way things are done in China not changing
China is making solar panels and nuclear reactors like the future depends on it. They are part of the problem, yes, but they are definitely part of the solution too.
> climate change cult
Wanting clean air and tame climate is "cult" behavior?
No, right now green extremists are primarily just bogeymen invoked by the usual conservative causes. I just don't feel a pressing need to jump into this fight on the side of legacy energy. Not yet and probably not ever.
If only we knew this was a looming problem 40 years ago and started doing something about it back then. The total economic cost would have been much lower.
And the scary thing is, the cost of climate change is only going to get worse. Eventually we will reach a point where the cost is unavoidable, and we will be spending trillions dealing with the consequences rather than billions preventing them.
There is a reason our own military pegs climate change as one of our biggest national security risks in the 21st century, because things are going to get very ugly when large populated regions of the world become inhospitable.
Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide which countries are emitting too much and need to cut back and which countries are using less than their fair share and can still expand.
One way to see this is to look at what happens when a country splits in two. With an unweighted comparison for determining shares any country that is using more than its share could split into smaller countries. The union of those smaller countries would still be emitting at least as much as before but it would move the finger to point at someone else.
The sensible comparison is to weight by population, with adjustments for trade to account for countries outsourcing their emissions to others.
India is around #130 in emissions per capita. Nigeria is around #170. They are both currently way below their fair share. If India and Nigeria as part of growing more wealthy needed to increase their emissions to the same level as Brazil, that could be offset by the US cutting emission by a mere 10%.
IR spectroscopy from satellite data.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
Additionally, western countries could just pay developing to use greener tech, covering extra cost’s needed to build carbon neutral economies, given western nations have profited enormously from their exploitation of the natural environment.
To believe that climate change is hopeless problem, and that solutions could not only be developed, but already exist, is pointlessly cynical and counterproductive. Rather than explain why we’re all doom, you could instead do some research and learn about the interesting work going on to solve the exact issues you mention.
Because we still all gotta share this earth together, and destroying it faster helps no one. How is that difficult to understand? Do you honestly think that just going "fuck it, let's keep polluting because other people are doing the same" is really going to get us to a better place?
We've already reduced estimated warming from ~6 degrees to ~3.5 degrees or so. It's not enough, but it's a hell of a lot better than statistically insignificant.
If it was purposeful that would be trackable.
> This is what happened a few years ago, when researchers detected high levels of CFC-11 in the atmosphere2, and traced them to eastern China3. They deduced the source on the basis of readings from monitoring stations in South Korea and Japan, reporting it in May 2019, and afterwards, levels began to fall. Scientists got somewhat lucky with CFC-11: monitoring stations equipped to detect that particular chemical happened to be located relatively close to the source.
Maybe we just need to be lucky again?
> Scientists got somewhat lucky with CFC-11: monitoring stations equipped to detect that particular chemical happened to be located relatively close to the source.
And somehow manufacturing them without anyone knowing?
Some appliances could be 30 years old?