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Comment by schmuckonwheels | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Now do per capita emissions and consider where 90% of anything you buy is manufactured. The world launders its manufacturing emissions through China.

  #  Country        CO2/capita  CO2 total (2022)   Population
  -  -------------  ----------  ----------------   ----------------
  1  China               8.89   12,667,428,430     1,425,179,569
  2  United States      14.21    4,853,780,240       341,534,046
  3  India               1.89    2,693,034,100     1,425,423,212

To save others the google search I did

I'm sure the climate will be just fine because China's per capita isn't as bad as the US.

America is still the largest historical polluter by a mile and China has already hit peak emissions. They are doing much better than America on this front. At this rate they’ll hit net zero before we will

China population is 4 times of US.

And a good portion of their pollution is on behalf of that much smaller population.

> Any investment by China is clearly because they found a way to profit from it

An investment that doesn't make a profit is kinda pointless. Business 101.

> Your neighbor thinks he's saving the world filling his roof with cheap Chinese solar panels

And he's right. God bless him for having more sense than you.

> ignoring the toxic chemicals and human cost that went into manufacturing it

Yeah no toxic chemicals or human cost whatsoever went into digging up your coal and gasoline.

Tell us honestly: why do you gain by lying?

If somebody does pollution for a while how in the world would that make them ineligible from being the leader in the future technologies that stop the pollution?

I am not following your logic or point here. The US has been the leading polluter, would that somehow stop us from saving the world from pollute if we came up with the technology for the rest of the world to stop polluting? Of course not. It's a very strange whataboutism that you are purveying that gets repeated frequently in online forums, but doesn't stand up to a little bit of back-and-forth.

per capita? or?

2-3x absolute. And of course they make a lot of our goods.

Pollutant-wise, are you insinuating that solar and wind and battery manufacturing is more polluting overall than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels they replace?

Parent deleted his comment with insults and got flagged dead. Perhaps insulting those with legitimate questions and people who have long-term accounts (indicating a lack of low-effort brigading ala reddit) isn't the best method, particularly when you don't respond to any of those questions. A bit of a "look in the mirror" moment.

Nothing to do with my comment or your reply specifically. I suspected bot voting manipulation and this entire discussion is filled with absolutely stupid Reddit-style comments. People posting substantive comments were being downvoted.

Some of the dumbest, low quality comments I read here come from 10+ year old accounts so account age has no correlation to discussion quality.

I can't argue in good faith when everyone is acting like children.

Depends on the regulations where the processes are happening

> China is by far the world's biggest polluter, by a factor of 2-3x that of the US so let's not paint them as some beacon of environmental stewardship.

China's leading the planet in development and deployment of renewable energy tech.

What proportion of China's emissions are a consequence of The West's externalizing the manufacturing of what it consumes?

At least with China in the driver's seat it looks like the planet's manufacturing needs will actually get cleaned up. Meanwhile the US will keep pearl clutching as it fades into irrelevance and Zimbabwean hyperinflation.

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