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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

It's not the 20th century anymore. China's per capita emissions are higher than you're letting on. Higher than some European countries.

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Wow, China's per capita emissions were, in 2018, ahead of Israel, Ireland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, Denmark, Italy, the U.K., Hungary, Portugal, Turkey, France, Switzerland, Croatia, Sweden, Ukraine, Latvia, Romania...the list they're behind may be shorter [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I think those numbers lump the emissions from goods produced in china and exported to other countries in with the emissions from domestic consumption. So they are inflated by China's vast exports. Yet even if you use consumption based emissions, China was around Spain's numbers in 2016 and by now probably has overtaken quite a few of the European countries.

China built a huge amount of infrastructure ranging from huge concrete cities to freeways and dams.

This infrastructure uses a lot of steel and concrete. It is not just an input for export goods - they are places for people to live.

Given that infrastructure building has set commodity prices for a decade, it wild be surprising if it wasn't the main part of thier emissions.

We can't begrudge Chinese, Indian and African people a modern way of life. Building that stuff emissions carbon. Its a difficult problem.

In a way trying to call a Chinese freeway an input emission for westbound exports is a moral cop-out.

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