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Comment by tsoukase | Hacker News Reader

This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.

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I don't think that's fair to say; the USA's CO2 emissions per capita are roughly 150% of China's, and the average Canadian emits more than 7x as much as an Indian citizen.

The entire EU produces only about half of the USA's total emissions, despite having a population of over 100 million more people.

Fair? Maybe not, but IMO it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is gross emissions. The effects of a warming planet will not be fair. We should be looking to reduce/eliminate emissions wherever they are happening.

China's actively fixing the problem. [0]

Why aren't we?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...

U.S. and EU CO₂ emissions have been actively dropping for the last ~20 years [0]. (Of course, it's different question how quickly they ought to be dropping.)

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

Good. They should keep doing it and faster.

That’s because we’ve outsourced so much of our manufacturing to China. Of course ours is going down while theirs is going up.

Fairness matters because the only way we can collectively decide to reduce emissions is if people everywhere feel its fair.

I don't think it's fair to look only at gross emissions by country. How can we demand that India drastically cut its emissions when its per capita output is already so low? Forcing reductions there effectively caps their living standards while developed nations continue to enjoy the benefits of much higher individual carbon footprints.

> The only thing that matters is gross emissions

Which is why, unless you can come up with a good argument that some people have some kind of divine or natural right to a bigger share of whatever global emissions budget we decide we need to stick to, per capita is the correct way to compare countries.

Lol. Not exactly an apt comparison.

"Average" Canadian. A lot of the population lives in a climate where half the year more energy is required to survive the climate. And the population is exponentially smaller than the United States, India, or China.

That's like calling out the guy in the mountains burning a campfire to stay warm at night when the guy sleeping on the beach in Hawaii requires none.

Point being, brand new account, if we want solutions it needs to be done without such angling or it all reduces to absurdities and jabs instead of cooperation. It needs to be realistic in terms of where people are being absurdly wasteful, but also sympathetic that we do not all face the same circumstances.

It's a hole and we don't get out by digging downward.

I agree that climate is a factor, but the survival argument only goes so far. Finland, Sweden and Norway face similar sub-zero winters but maintain a higher standard of living with less than half the per capita emissions of Canada.

> This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible.

Nobody who understands the subject claims that it is reversible on a human life scale. In the realistic best cases, it’d stabilise in a couple of decades and slowly decrease from there.

The real question is not whether it is reversible, but how high it will go and how we are going to deal with it.

We can still limit the amount of the global warming. It does not run by itself, but it could start doing so.

No only that, but per capita emissions of developed countries still remains higher. For example I found that US/Russia have 6x per capita emissions compared to India

This perspective is so important. The wealthy in western society are responsible for a massively disproportionate amount of emissions.

this strangely self-hating and suicidal message has been spread for decades now, this falls along the same kinds of thinking as blood grudges and blood wars.

we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.

yeah, the audacity is insane China's been manufacturing and deploying more solar than anyone and solar+battery is a clear path forward.

The people making these arguments are mendacious and misanthropic to the point of deep irrationality, so many people have been trained to do nothing, try nothing, and assume the worst, I don't know who trained these people to embody epistemological learned helplessness but it boggles the mind.

There is not "one ship" to sail or not - it is a matter of degree.

Warming is here and will continue.

Our decisions from here on could vary the outcomes between massive disruption and movement of people to a wholly uninhabitable planet.

Ideally us rich countries would help pay for overhauling of infrastructure in developing nations since each $ goes way further to reduce emissions there compared to at home.

This assume you can’t have a modern, high quality of life without destroying our ecosystem we depend on to survive. When in fact, we can have both. It would just require making a few very wealthy people less so.

> Nobody can remove this right from them.

They do not have to repeat our mistakes. We can help them build out renewable energy instead.

At least when the USA did it they only had 75-100 million citizens doing the polluting.

Well here's hoping they don't decide to take the US approach to 'living nicely': an absolute sense of entitlement to other people's resources all so they can have bigger vehicles and airconditioned forecourts to refuel them in. It's honestly disgusting - especially when you consider how they go about obtaining those resources. War. Fuck war and those that push for it all so that they can 'live big'.

We don't want your disgusting lifestyle. We want you to stop being so bloody infantile and greedy.

Apologies for the strong words but the current state of things has me pissed off.

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