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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

The world is in a weird prisoner’s dilemma right now. US, China, to some extent India, are pumping out CO2, and deriving a short term “co2” dividend of higher growth, unencumbered by green transition cost. Europe is somewhat trying harder to transition away, partly for “green” reasons, partly for sovereignty reasons, partly because they just outsourced their industry.

Europe is also potentially more affected by climate change than US and China, as I understand. India of course would be toast in a hotter world, but perhaps it too poor right now to do much about it easily.

But discoordinated action won’t move the dial. So should Europe continue on the green path while losing GDP share to US, China and India? Should it jump on the coal bandwagon and screw up the world since everyone else is? It’s not like green contrarian action will do much good on its own.

It’s altogether a not pretty picture…

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> So should Europe continue on the green path while losing GDP share to US, China and India?

So the article is about huge private EV car marketshare in Denmark, but for the whole EU the EV marketshare of passenger vehicles is around 25% right now, plus around 10% PHEV. China (a much bigger car market) is at 43% EV marketshare, and also another 20% for PHEV. They have invested much more in the passenger vehicle transition to EV than us (the EU). And they did it partly (also, of course, for other reasons) because they have seen this as an opportunity to leapfrog powerful foreign carmakers that have made or sold huge amounts of ICE cars in China and create their own independent car industry.

Which means this is clearly the wrong question. Even if somehow the EU car industry returned to making ICEs, it won't save them.

> India of course would be toast in a hotter world, but perhaps it too poor right now to do much about it easily.

Even so, their 3-wheeler market is already overwhelmingly EVs.

> But discoordinated action won’t move the dial.

And this take is incorrect too. If you have a look at the IPCC RCP scenarios, the worst (RCP8.5 I believe) has already been dropped because it's improbable because the emmission curve has been trending a bit lower as a result of our actions. China's CO2 output is peaking right about now. And we have CBAM. We have to do what's possible.

I didn’t make it clear but my question isn’t about cars specifically. Cars are clearly a part of it.

I can’t find any handy data, but my understanding is that US and China certainly have the most fossil fuel in their new power plants. As well as, notably, China putting online a lot of renewables and nuclear in absolute terms.

> US and China certainly have the most fossil fuel in their new power plants

Don't know about the US (mostly I think it's renewables) but as for China, this statement comes up often, and I think it's not entirely correct. Because investment seems to work different there, there is a lot of coal power plants either planned, permitted or even constructed, but that then does not show up in the actual coal use or energy generation stats. So probably it's a mix of planned but then canned, old coal plants being replaced etc. Thanks to the Iran crisis this years coal use will certainly rise, but last year at least coal share of energy generation has fallen.

Plus, the US dumped the most CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place. They shat in the pool and now seem be to telling others to clean up the pool. At least we received some good entertainment content from the US in return.

In fairness they’re not telling us to clean up the pool, but rather that swimming in shit is great and we should all make a nice big shitty swamp.

Not much of a consolation but I want to give credit where it’s due.

My impression is that the US is more vulnerable to climate change than Europe. While Europe has heat waves, the US has a hurricane problem that simply does not exist in Europe, which can result in horrendous societal damage.

Don't forget tornadoes and nor'easters (temperate-zone winter hurricanes). How do we compare on floods, drought, wildfires, heat domes, and deep cold?

Huh?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

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