Hacker News Reader

Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Also - in 2023 - if you really want to be an eco terrorist, you should be terrorising china, and most of asia. They are increasing their carbon emissions like there's no tomorrow.

Frankly, nothing the EU or the USA is doing at this point will matter, if Asia carries on doing what they are doing.

So these motorway blocking and paint throwing stunts are not only ridiculous narcissistic acts, that do more damage than good to the reputation of this whole eco activist movement, they are also completely useless in terms of CO2 reduction.

We need to either invent technology (which we are) to reduce emissions, or even extract them for the air, OR we need some crazy form of diplomacy to stop Asia from growing (this is called war btw).

It really is laughable that China is never part of the equation for these save the planet types.

View on HN

China's per capita emissions are about the same as a middle of the road European country, and about 1/2 that of the US.

And yes, per capita is a much more relevant measure than per country as far as determining whether or not a given country is emitting over or under its fair share of the world's total emission budget, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.

If you go per country than any country that is emitting more than its share could simply split into 2 or more smaller countries, without any change whatsoever in the total emissions of that set of people, and go from being over their share to under their share. Doing so slightly lowers the fair share of other countries which might cause some of them to be over, but no problem--they can just split too. The end game for that is a huge number of tiny countries which converges to per capita.

Best would be something like per capita with adjustments for trade between countries.

If you brought emissions per capita in the US and EU down to levels of Asia, would that not far exceed the outcomes people are currently trying to get to?

If you relocated the subset of manufacturing emissions that eminate from Asian manufacturing for the purposes of selling products to US/EU, while keeping to the above, so that product lifecycle emissions are accrued where they’re consumed rather than the current proxy emissions by outsourcing manufacturing to asia. Would that not automatically crater Asia emissions?

Neither of these actions would require impressing action upon foreign sovereigns.

China's exports are actually flat at this point, yet their emissions are exploding. They have 1bn people who want to be richer. There is enough internal demand now that will mean emissions will rise without exports to the west.

Have you seen the graph or how emissions have fallen for the US and EU in the last 5 years, yet every year more emissions are added by china than those put together?

If China were to keep depending on coal.

In 2020 China has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060, they will be under pressure to do better than that.

> Have you seen the graph or how emissions have fallen for the US and EU in the last 5 years,

What, including Covid, when the west temporarily turned off coal-power stations? Better to compare 2023 to 2019 numbers.

For accuracy most of these discussions revolve around the dichotomy between China and EU+US but in reality if we look at emissions per capita the real outliers are the Gulf countries, Australia, US, Canada (in that order).

So lets not forget about the Gulf countries and Canada/Australia role and responsability in our public discussion on this matter.

I think you're focusing on the percieved biggest part of the problem and ignoring that it's both possible and useful to adress other parts. Especially if you can't do anything about the big one.

Per-capita emissions is the only valid way of looking at it. If China split up into 20 separate countries, would you point the finger elsewhere because each of those 20 separate countries doesn't pollute much?

> Per-capita emissions is the only valid way of looking at it

No. Rate of change is what matters. How does per capita emissions matter when the graph looks like this? https://twitter.com/GuntramWolff/status/1627029836727459840

Why should people in emerging economies stop improving their lives when it's emissions that made the first world into the advanced economies that they are that got us to this point in the first place?

CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, so it is the area under the curve over the last few hundred years that matters.

China's emissions are currently rising, but they are also deploying a ton of solar and nuclear power plants, and electric cars use is rapidly growing (much faster than in the US). Most analysts expect China's emissions to peak in a few years and then decline.

Global warming isn't caused by the first derivative of emissions. It's caused by total emissions.

And again, per-capita is what matters. If China split up into 20 countries, your focus would not be on China, because it would not show up on that chart of yours. The focus on China really is that bone-headed.

I would agree that China, India and USA are probably the key countries here ( and to a lesser extent other parts of Asia, Africa and South America). However I can't see China and India doing anything significant here. USA could be leading the change along with parts of Europe, but I agree it will be difficult to do anything without the largest and more developing countries getting on board.

I know a lot of climate activists in the UK and while it's a noble goal, the UK is probably contributing less than 0.5% so any change there is fairly insignificant relatively.

> Frankly, nothing the EU or the USA is doing at this point will matter, if Asia carries on doing what they are doing.

Perhaps something that EU or the USA ends up doing, will make Asia not to carry what they are doing?

> We need to either invent technology (which we are) to reduce emissions, or even extract them from the air, OR we need some crazy form of diplomacy to stop Asia from growing

This seems to give some hope that EU or the USA can do something on their own, which feels like it may even matter. Or did you mean "AND" instead of "OR"?

> So these motorway blocking and paint throwing stunts are not only ridiculous narcissistic acts, that do more damage than good to the reputation of this whole eco activist movement,

This is worth emphasizing. This sort of acts are [generally rightly] seen as narcissistic trust-fund kids attacking the working class who are just trying to get to work so they can pay rent. Attacks on commuters is how you build animosity, not support. It is counterproductive but the people who do it don't care because they have narcissistic motivations. The more the victims of their protest hurl verbal or physical abuse back at the protesters, the more the protesters feel they have accomplished. Utterly counterproductive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com