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Alifatisk

Good news for China, bad news for US. But don't forget China still emit 16B compared to US who emit 6B tons of CO2

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pollution...

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> But don't forget China still emit 16B compared to US who emit 6B tons of CO2

China has 1.4 billion people, while U.S. has 340 million people.

And China makes all of our stuff. Instead of putting tariffs on solar from China, we should have dropped a trillion dollars on it and put it everywhere.

Before you drop a trillion dollars, you do a cost benefit analysis and you factor for switching costs, the unique geography and population distribution of the U.S. the expected lifespan of solar panels, the battery install capacity necessary to facilitate nighttime and 100 to 1000 year weather event emergencies, the capacity to keep the grid online in the event of a world war, the cost to install HV lines to transport from solar hubs, etc.

You don't dogmatically order $1 trillion of something and sacrifice a functional independent, diverse, weather resilient, geographically distributed energy grid thats served the nation that invented the light bulb for over 125 years, because you read a clickbait headline about China.

> the capacity to keep the grid online in the event of a world war

If I'm learning anything from Russia, its that fossil fuel plants are hella vulnerable in a war. Solar would be much safer.

Fossil Fuel Plant: Knock out the right machine or building and you knock out the plant. The plant is literally storing explosives. The plant must be resupplied which leaves supply trucks/boats/pipelines vulnerable.

Solar: Distributed over a large area. Made of many independent complete power-generating devices so if you knock out 5% of them, all you've accomplished is reducing power output by 5%. Does not need a constant flow of supplies.

> sacrifice a functional ....

Who said we are sacrificing anything? We only gain, and we gain a distributed, diverse, < $1watt of generating capacity.

Your comment makes no sense.

Per capita is a better metric but it's worth noting that China is world's factory - it's easy to reduce emissions if you offshore a lot of your production elsewhere...

And China has the US beat per capita in emissions.

Those people aren't making decisions. Measure emissions per government. They have one government.

The factories are responsible for the pollution from goods, and the state is responsible for the factories it controls.

And the US, like most of the West, had outsourced their most carbon intensive manufacturing.

And looking at historical emissions, US contributed 25% of all emissions vs China 15%.

Emissions impact the whole world, not only the country that emit them. And the relevant metric is not per country, but per inhabitant in this country.

Not really. Otherwise, US could slash its "relevant metrics" by annexing Nigeria.

And China could slash the metrics you believe are "relevant" by dividing into 20 countries. It's time to stop talking and start doing. China is doing.

Except that does make sense because the new country would be the weighted average of the average CO2 contribution for both Americans and Nigerians.

Clearly, that means annexing Nigeria is the best way for US to reduce its GHG emissions.

Just add poor people to your country! Per capita emission metrics HATE this one weird trick!

Jeez the extent some people will go to not install solar.

I'm fine with that. So go ahead, annex Nigeria, you coward.

So tell me why are you using absolute numbers?

Those are the numbers that matter. Percentages are how you lie with statistics.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

There is a great book on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

But you have to know enough statistics to be sneaky with it.

Globally, the total matters. By country, the per capita matters.

Disagree. What matters is the absolute number, and the direction that number is going in.

What matters is that the US' number keeps growing.

It hasn't. It's been down since 2007 despite increased population.

The article is literally about how it grew this year.

China has a lot more people than the US. In fact, the per capita CO2 production is way more in the US.

adjust that for the population...

Most of Chinese emissions are due to the production of American products.

Not just American products.

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