Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Unless you want to bomb China and India and Africa, carbon capture is going to be a major aspect of any response to climate change. The amount of concrete that’s going to be poured in those places over the next century is by itself going to release enormous amounts of CO2.

View on HN

You make it sound like the USA isn't the largest per capita polluter in the world.

The climate doesn’t care about “per capita.”

I don't know why you put that in quotes.

My point is it is rediculous to argue for geoengineering while pointing your finger at the third world, when the country with the largest historical emissions still relies heavily on coal.

It sure does. One chinese person driving a gas vehicle, shouldn't be blamed over Taylor Swift taking a thousand trips on her jet just because he is from China. Everybody needs to pitch in.

It’s not about blame, and we will never get everyone even in single countries to “pitch in,” much less have the world working together. That’s a children’s fantasy.

The world the west is confronted with is this: Chinese and Indians want to live like Americans. The legitimacy of the government in places like China and Bangladesh rest on being able to deliver 6-8% GDP growth every year. They won’t do anything to jeopardize that, and we can’t control what they do. So carbon capture is going to have to be a pillar of any climate mitigation strategy.

Going by the numbers, and using this logic, China should be bombing the US.

It seems pretty self evident that China would not be in favor of military action to enforce climate goals. GP's point was that still developing nations are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.

For the time being the USA is still a big polluter per capita than China.

What matters for the climate is absolute emissions, not the some underlying fairness metric. Chinese CO2 emissions dwarf ours. Further: China's CO2 emissions are rising. Ours peaked in 2008, and are today lower than they were in 1990.

Of course climate change is about absolute emissions.

I am replying to this nonsense:

> are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.

What matters is per capita emissions, not some arbitrary measure based on how borders happen to have been drawn hundreds of years ago. A small country like Kuwait, or the US (relative to China) cant just pretend not to be part of the problem, because they can point at some region with more people that consequently have larger emissions.

And historical emissions are relevant, since the carbon budget relates to the total amount of co2 in the air above pre-industrial levels. That co2 budget was largely "spent" by the US.

China emits something like 2.5x more metric tons of CO2 than does the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com