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Comment by nluken | Hacker News Reader

I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0 difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e. reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to do that regardless. Also don't dismiss that doing these things puts international pressure on developing nations to clean up their energy as demand increases. Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions until they do first. Reducing carbon domestically is necessary to try to reduce it abroad.

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> what do you propose western nations do?

Ban imports of goods made in ways that would have been illegal to do here.

Which ones should we start with? We can't go from 0 to 100 overnight, that would halt everything.

Start with those where the environmental impact is best known and understood.

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.

You could do all of them and give companies time to adjust their supply chains. I'm sure given such a sweeping order, supply chains will reorient rapidly to other places.

Why not? Hard stop on all noncompliant trade with China.

Would destroy the economy in the short run, but it would eventually correct.

"If we kill all of our populace, we wont care if the world warms" isn't a very compelling argument.

What do you think destroying the economy does?

> I mean what do you propose western nations do?

> 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...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

No fan of straw bans, but aren't they motivated by a different ecological issue, namely reducing plastic waste

Yes they are so perhaps that was a strawman, if you will. I could equally have made the point with "sustainable" versions of inherently unsustainable products or any manner of surface-level "environment-friendly" change.

If it was really about that, you'd think they'd force starbucks to sell you a cold drink in a paper cup instead of what is basically a giant straw you can't locally recycle anyhow.

You're thinking of plastic bag bans.

Bags blow in the wind and wind up all sorts of places.

Straws mostly wind up in proper trash streams.

>I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing?

We could compel China and other countries, by diplomatic and other means

How do you diplomatically convince another country that their people need to have a lifestyle and standard of living that emits a fraction of the CO2 that your people emit?

They’re doing it to us (Americans)… stands to reason that it can be done to others

Doing what to us?

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).

>Doing what to us?

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?

We've been observing for more than a year now how well that works in practice. Don't overestimate your abilities.

That sorta requires you to lead by example, first.

Does it? The US is currently compelling Russia to give up its claims in eastern Ukraine, despite occupying whole parts of Syria and other places itself

US hasn’t invaded Syria in a colonial war. They also didn’t commit genocide in Syria.

Someone might want to tell the people of Syria.

>"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...

> Someone might want to tell the people of Syria.

The phrase “…the people of Syria…” is doing a lot of work in this sentence.

Not every culture values virtue signaling as much as the current regime in the west; performative acts are not necessarily going to influence other cultures such as China, etc.

I agree. China is either going to require us to find a real diplomatic solution, or get so good at producing technology that removes carbon from the environment sustainably, at scale, that we can simply suck up other countries' excess carbon. Either way, these will be expensive and the political will for such solutions is probably not here in our current political system. I commented further down about needing to address political corruption first and foremost (removing "lobbyists", overturning CU, etc) - I think this will be an important step in producing a political system that will even allow us to effectively address climate change in the first place.

Banning CFC's was not "virtue signalling". The Montreal Protocol has been a massive success and likely already saved countless lives.

Do you see all investments in green energy and waste reduction - even those that are creating material effects at a national level - as performative?

I think it's pretty clear that the only two outcomes of this scenario are societal destruction via climate catastrophe or we find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production.

> find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production.

Have you heard of our lord and savior Nuclear Fission? We should build a shitload of restores all over the place.

Nixon wanted to have 1000 operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. by 2000. Today we have 92 of them, which power 8% of our electricity demand. Making the assumption that those other 918 reactors we would have had generate the same output as these, we could have been almost entirely powered through nuclear energy today had nuclear energy not seen pushback over the last 50 years. Instead, c'est la vie

We're making important strides on fusion too, which makes fission look like a waste of radiological material, in comparison.

They are not really competing for the same material. Fission smashes neutrons into big atoms to make them smaller, fusion smashes small atoms into each other to make them bigger. Both work by making atoms of the more stable medium-sized variety, and extracting the energy of that process.

But yeah, looks like commercial fusion reactors are getting closer.

Ha! We need a 100x or 1000x improvement in efficiency before a commercial power station becomes viable.

I can’t see fusion energy being a reality in my lifetime.

Aren't we still on the "fusion never" funding timeline? I mean, we might accidentally luck into it, but it's not like we're really trying hard.

Accept that nothing of significance will be done until it is far too late and most of the world is drowning, burning or starving.

Enjoy your life, for goodness sake don't have children and prepare for the collapse of civilisation in around 50 years or so.

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