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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

That trend stopped last year in China and will probably stop this year in India.

Showing graphs which start in the year 2000 (when China had relatively low CO2 emissions) and ending in 2023 (a year before they peaked in 2024) is simply lying with statistics. The most resent data shows that China’s emissions are no longer rising.

Now I know we need to do better then that and emissions need to drop extremely fast if we want to stay under catastrophic 2° C warming. But the truth is that China and India are doing exactly as bad as the rest of the world (including Europe here). And considering the economic factors (that Europe can in fact afford the changes required; but still fall way short) India is doing much better then the rest of the world.

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> That trend stopped last year in China and will probably stop this year in India.

Maybe. For now, for the major cities, it shows that "a rapidly expanding ecological catastrophe" is downgraded to "an expanding ecological catastrophe", and only China's own data is even showing that slowdown. And, by the way, the source of the catastrophe isn't even oil. It's almost exclusively coal. That's what China and India need to stop with. But I hope the slowdown's real.

As for the eternal "someone else must pay, they can afford it" comment. Best of luck convincing the European parliaments. I've actually tried that once. Seriously, not like those "protests". Not going to happen. Plus, frankly, it's harder now than when I tried it and got crushed.

Maybe the Iran war will accomplish what nobody could. Of course it'll probably increase coal use. And to calculate that effect, you should as a rule of thumb take the octane number, divide by 2, and that's how much worse coal is than oil. Compared to car fuel, it's about 50 times worse. So I doubt it.

China and India need to stop with coal how about USA?

CO2 emissions per capita, global ranking, 2023

9 United States 13.088

19 China 7.89

97 India 1.922

https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions

These reductions are not like the ones we observed during the Pandemic where the emissions took a dip because of the decreased consumption during lockdown. These reductions are because both China and (to a lesser degree) India have invested in the infrastructure to decrease their dependence on fossil fuel. This in combination to the fact that the economics are heavily in favor of renewable energy. Experts are pretty much in agreement that these reductions are here to stay, and are very likely to speed up in fact.

I hate to say it, but what is probably happening is the economics are causing this, not the Iran war. Renewable energy is simply becoming this much cheaper, that even the capitalist idealogs in the Chinese and the Indian governments are rolling out renewable infrastructure. In other words, capitalism is finally reducing emissions, 20 years too late and 90% too slow.

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