Comment by therobots927 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by therobots927 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sure they did everything you describe and more. I'm well aware of how corporations externalize costs to increase profit margins, and I'm a huge proponent of stronger regulation and government involvement in corporate day-to-day. It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces. The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil. This would have profound geo-political implications and would significantly weaken America's standing. Saudi Arabia and Russia will never stop drilling for oil. Like it or not the only way out of this mess is further investment in technologoy and access to energetic resources. The government needs to be subsidizing construction of nuclear power plants in every state of the nation. It needs to be building solar farms all over the western US and hanging high voltage cables from coast to coast. It needs a train network like China. I could go on and on.

> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil

> Saudi Arabia and Russia will never stop

You are contradicting yourself - either the global economy won’t grind to a halt, because activist is ineffective, or activism is too effective?

The west should be cleaning up its own house and leading by example - instead it has spent decades pointing fingers at China and other countries shouting ‘you first’. Well, guess what, China is now worlds leading user and producer of eclectic cars, has electric busses and most of USA doesn’t. We are the ones behind now, and in fact neither you nor the media have realised it yet.

In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant. The Sputnik moment has already happened, you just aren’t watching.

The US hardly screams at China at all, but China is completely fixated on the US (if media is anything to go by). The US will do things at its own pace like China does, picking at it as a competition is merely a saving face thing that doesn't really exist in the west.

Its only been a decade or so since China had all of those things. You would see multiple obviously imported Tesla Model S's in Beijing way before you saw even one BYD EV taxi. Then China invested in a short period of time and now they have much more than the US. But the time period was so short that China hardly has a moat in these areas.

> In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant.

We heard this before in the 1980s and that didn't pan out at all. This is just the 1980s again with China in place of Japan; China even has a much bigger real estate bubble than Japan ever did, the consequences will be similar if not worse. The same demographic crash is also coming to China, history is just a broken record.

China has 10x the population and impact of Japan; this is a silly comparison. Japan never had this large share of the world manufacturing

Doesn’t that just make it worse?

> The west should be cleaning up its own house and leading by example - instead it has spent decades pointing fingers at China and other countries shouting ‘you first’

This is inaccurate. The west has been cleaning up its own house and leading by example. While they could and should have done much more, western countries implemented emissions reductions measures long before demanding anyone else do it, and in fact for decades explicitly excluded China as a developing country from having to comply with these agreements.

As a result, western emissions have been declining for decades and, most importantly, became decoupled from GDP growth for the first time in history.

In the meantime China has dramatically surged its emissions, becoming the biggest emitter by far. India and Russia have also increased emissions substantially, becoming the third and fourth highest emitters. In fact, the entire EU now produces fewer carbon emissions than India, and only a little more than Russia.

If current trends continue, before long the top three emitters will be China, India, and Russia, and their trajectories remain worrying.

So any solution that doesn’t encourage those countries to also reduce their emissions is going to doom us all to accelerating climate change.

As for the moral argument, it’s no more moral for China, India, and Russia to emit all the pollution they can than it was when western countries did it. If anything, it’s even more immoral given that better technologies exist and we understand the problem much better.

> As a result, western emissions have been declining for decades and, most importantly

Most of our emission reduction was achieved by outsourcing manufacturing to China. We don’t get an award for that:

> Eu now produces fewer emission than India

Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does

Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.

Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market

> Most of our emission reduction was achieved by outsourcing manufacturing to China. We don’t get an award for that:

That's a common fallacy and overly simplistic. EU reductions in emissions from power generation, transportation, agriculture, construction, and similar have all been reduced by similar proportions as those from industry.

> Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does

Even on a per capita level, China emits more per capita than the EU does, and not that much less than the US which is still reducing its per capita emissions, so it will likely surpass it soon. India, for now, emits less, but under current trends will surpass the EU on a per capita basis before long too.

Fact is, both the EU's and US's annual carbon emissions have been trending down for years now, whereas those of China and India continue to point sharply upward. It makes zero sense to focus all the attention and anger on the US and the EU while ignoring what will soon become the world's top emitters.

> Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.

Russia is one of the world's top five emitters of greenhouse gases, of course it matters.

> Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market

I didn't say we should base this on immorality, I'm saying your argument is implicitly based on it and incorrect as a result. What matters is the volume of emissions, and unless we slow down the level of emissions from China, India, Russia, and others forming the top tier of emitters we're not going to be able to meet any good climate targets.

> Well, guess what, China is now worlds leading user and producer of eclectic cars, has electric busses and most of USA doesn’t. We are the ones behind now, and in fact neither you nor the media have realised it yet.

The media has realized, unfortunately, hence the latest barrage of complaints about overproduction/dumping. Blinken and Yellen's speeches about that were pathetic.

> I'm a huge proponent of stronger regulation and government involvement in corporate day-to-day.

I agree, however we aren’t seeing this in any meaningful fashion, let alone the amount we need to be seeing it to stave off catastrophe. So given this context, I am all for citizen/employee protest in whatever way required to get things to change course.

> It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces.

I agree with this. Sorry if my last post was a bit aggressive.

> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil.

I agree with this, but the longer we kick the can down the road, the more urgent the situation becomes and the more drastic the medicine we’ll need to take. So while right now we can possibly get by with a phase out so long as we start getting much more aggressive on renewables, in 20 years we’ll likely be in a “we have to turn off the oil taps immediately” situation. Would’ve been nice if Exxon hadn’t hidden their climate change data in the 60s and given everyone a chance for a peaceful transition. But they didn’t, and so I support everyone refusing to work on energy projects.

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