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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter

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This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.

Yeah the issue is "minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population", but it's not any 5%, it's the powerful 5% who resist the change using any means necessary including producing mass propaganda and steering the votes to the nazi parties which promise to revert to the old ways and stop any progress on the climate front.

> This is an interesting take because for example the EU car fleet emmission rules, fuel taxes, additional member state polluting car taxes etc. do exactly that. Otherwise ICE cars in the EU would be far far cheaper and the EV marketshare would be much lower.

Can't speak about EV marketshare (I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read), but large part of population is buying only used ICE cars, or get new ones on a business lease; only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.

Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.

> I'm guessing someone is bundling hybrids into stats you read

no: https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/

> only minority actually pays the sticker price for new car out-of-pocket.

yes, mostly because new cars are very expensive, and that's exactly the point I was making

> Also, it's hard not to notice how much general population hates those. I'm actually surprised EU got as far as it got here, pretty sure they're burning a lot of political capital because of environmental regulations.

Exactly. But it's hard to quantify how much of that hatred is genuine and how much of it is fanned and amplified by fossil interests and reckless politicians. My guess is that around 80% of it is manufactured.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. In a hypothetical EU without political intervention, Chinese EVs would be available without tariffs, and those would probably sell very well without any mandates.

> even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population

5%? No. That's a lot of people.

At least in the USA, the one and only thing that matters is what benefits the top 0.0002% richest (approximate percentage of billionares in the US). Nobody else matters anymore.

Yes. Nietzsche once said God is dead and I guess the time has come to say "the systemic change is dead".

Our destiny is not decided by a abstract superorganism, but a handful of people given godly rights create the rulebook. And to take us with them in the pursuit of suicide.

Older people matter, given they vote

An interesting idea would be a democracy where your voting right is proportional to your expected remaining years to live. This would give more power to younger generations that are the ones that are going to be the most impacted by the decisions.

We should attempt to name all ~700k people on that list.

If you look at the derivatives, there is no change a Western Democracy can make that will matter as this plays out.

Humanity being saved by China just dumping money into solar because why not, is certainly a take.

Because "why not?" Do we understand that humanity includes Chinese people? Do we also understand A) the steps they're already taking to reduce emissions and B) how much of their emissions historically and today are in service of Western consumers?

i don't accept arguments in the form of B when its a business (our pollution is just serving our customers demand, its their moral responsibility to reduce consumption), and I also don't accept it in country form.

centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.

> i don't accept arguments in the form of B

Feel free to share why not. At the end of the China is still part of a global system dominated by capitalism and they have to play the markets game in order to survive.

They could easily fully do things their own way but that would mean, for example, chance of private intellectual property, which would mean no WTO membership, which would mean massively reduced capacity for trade, which would put them at such a disadvantage they'd inevitably collapse.

I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable. I think people who sell murder-for-hire services are culpable of murder, even if they are paid by someone else

If the argument were about slavery instead - slavery enables cheaper goods, ergo by buying our products, some of which were made using slavery, but we refuse to reveal which ones, but nonetheless by buying them you support slavery and are morally responsible for the slavery not us. Nobody would accept this framing.

I agree that China has done very well from manufacturing and trade, and would not have done as well if they had not industrialised at a large scale. But that doesn't change the fact that industrialisation of this kind causes pollution and is damaging the planet and it especially doesn't mean that China has no moral obligation to do as much as it can to reduce emissions.

I also don't believe the argument that the pollution is inherent to production, or that there is no way to satisfy demand without pollution. (or that china, specifically, derserves to be the one to profit from satisfying that demand). Production of almost all commodities can be done without massive emissions these days, and even when it couldn't, nobody was forced to ramp up production

Someone will inevitably jump in here to point out that china makes a lot of solar or whatever. Sure, they do. They also make a lot of wind power. Their emissions per capita are trending in the wrong direction though. Europe's have been going DOWN since the 1970s, and china's are going UP. China's emissions per capita are roughly equal with the EU at the moment and are going up - pretty soon they will catch up and surpass the US.

Re: emissions per capita - why should the Chinese be limited to a lower amount than the US citizens? They want a high standard of living too.

that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions.

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.

I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one

There's a phrase for that "do as I say, not as I do" (see also: "pulling the ladder up"). This is rightly viewed as hypocritical by those on the receiving end.

There's also the phrase "Now we know better". When the industrial revolution came to the US we were ignorant and we polluted the world like crazy because of that. Today, we've learned from that mistake. We now know that you can and must control the pollution factories spew out into the world, even though doing that cuts into corporate profits.

China doesn't get a pass to pollute at historic US levels for their industrialization because they have the benefit of having learned from our mistakes. Rejecting the "No Fair! It's my turn to needlessly destroy the planet just to make myself richer!" argument isn't hypocrisy, it's just acknowledgement of history and the progress we've made in dealing with the problems we ran into while we were industrializing without the benefit of anyone else's past experience.

China and every other developing country has already been benefiting enormously from the example of developed nations, but they want to cherry pick the things that maximize their wealth while ignoring everything else at the expense of every living thing on Earth. They want to point to the damage we caused while we were stumbling around in the dark with no idea where we were going, even though today the sun is shining and they've got all the maps we made and GPS to guide them.

These countries are competitive entities.

Even though the planet is shared, the earlier developed nations have gained advantages from their polluting (and at many times, colonial) past that allowed them to pull ahead of other countries. Now they want to stop others going down the same path without giving up their entrenched advantage. That is pulling the ladder up.

Either give up those advantages in the form of reparations (will never happen) or remove any pretense of moral superiority when all you are doing is just preserving your leading position gained using practices you now decry.

They don't want to stop others from following the same path, they just don't want them to do it while disregarding every lesson we learned the hard way whenever it's convenient for them. That's not pulling the ladder up, it's more like wanting OSHA regulations to be followed while they climb it for everyone's safety, theirs included. It's a little slower, but everybody still gets to where they want to go.

Reparations are already in progress and have been for generations. Extensive efforts have been made to start restoring the polluted land and water. Workers rights and health have been improved. The use of slavery has been greatly reduced. The ozone layer is recovering. Trillions have been spent on research and development into ways to help repair and prevent the damage developed nations have inflicted on the planet. Even after all this time we're still working on rebuilding what was destroyed and we've still got a long away to go. in some areas we're actually backsliding. We can't let every developing nation destroy our progress and set us back as if nobody knows any better. Our past was both costly and profitable. We made many of our mistakes out of ignorance, but we know better now and everybody needs to start acting like it.

It's not all a burden for the now developing countries either. They get the benefit of not having to start their industrialization from nothing. They've got access to centuries of knowledge and technology the developed world obtained at great cost. Having the perspective and advantage of all that history and progress however also makes it unacceptable for them to make the same costly mistakes just to satisfy their greed. Now that we all know what is at stake, it falls on everyone to make sure that many of humanity's past sins aren't repeated.

if the mafia boss tells his sons that they should avoid a life of crime, that doing it makes things worse for society and ones self, is he a hypocrite? should the boys follow his advice?

my read is yes and yes

are you suggesting it should instead be yes and no? that because the sons want to be rich they are morally in the right for going into a life of crime, even knowing the consequences?

The countries are competitive with each other, not in a father/son relationship.

At least the father has a natural lifespan and the ill gotten riches would go to the son(s). Can we say the same thing about the riches of say, the USA? If China does nothing then they will inherit all of it? Or will the US just keep its fortune gained through whatever means, and just tell other up and coming countries to suck rocks and know their place while using the Earth as justification?

Do you really think that the reason the boys shouldn't do crime is because it's their father telling them this?

Or because they will inherit money? Do you really believe what you are saying?

This is a tortured analogy. Yes it's even better if they don't do crime and yet inherit the money as that would allow them to claim they have clean hands, like the developed world is doing now. ("Colonialism? Massive resource extraction? That was a long time ago. But we're still keeping our riches and embargoing our tech from you. Don't try to do what we did.")

So how much of US emissions is outsourced?

I refer you to my comment at the top of this chain on "outsourced" emissions

"I don't accept" is not an answer though. When the EU can create CBAM, so can (and should) the US and anyone else. That way we don't have to talk about moral responsibility and can progress to adequate international carbon pricing.

I don’t think looking at first derivative of emissions per capita is more important than absolute measure when thinking of the morality of polluting. If China’s per capita is lower than some other place, they’re doing better. The first derivative tells us that might become untrue, but countries with high historical emissions don’t get a pass because they’re lowering those high levels as compared to a lower emitting country whose emissions are rising.

china's historical total emissions will also surpass the US's pretty soon, on account of their nearly 3x as large population combined with their per capita emissions being nearly as high. and as mentioned, theirs is likely set to grow way faster. I agree extrapolating isn't always the best way to assign historical blame (for whatever that might mean), I do think it makes sense to use when thinking about what policies people ought to take now, to reduce damage as much as possible

I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns

I believe that every person has just as much right to emit pollution in 2027 as every other person in 2027.

What that person emitted in 2025 has no bearing on their 2027 “allowance”.

We can certainly discuss how much is an appropriate, sustainable, or defensible per-person amount, but I’m only interested in the 2027 amounts, not the increase in their amount versus a prior period, nor in allowing past large emitters to continue at higher rates than past low-emitters.

(I think we strongly agree on your last paragraph’s point. That was the point of my GP post, but maybe it didn’t land somehow.)

> I believe that every person has just as much right to emit pollution in 2027 as every other person in 2027.

Because every person has their own planet?

No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!

It would seem far more weird to me to argue the opposite: “These people have the right to emit 2x or 10x as much as these other people!” (Or equivalently, “these people are only allowed to emit 10% or 50% of what these other people are…”)

> No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!

The issue is that in the current situation, that effectively means we might as well give up on the idea of doing anything about climate change.

Besides, people don't care about CO2 emissions, only factory owners do, governments do. People care about energy available for use for them personally. In fact people generally dislike anything that emits CO2, from cars (somewhat) to coal mines and plants (which people dislike A LOT). If you care about "everyone", there's no need to give people CO2 emission rights, just energy.

right. I agree with this for a large part - I do think though, that chinas current level per capita 10.81 tons (higher than EU 7.14 tons, less than america 17.34 tons) is not sustanable, and they do not seem to be taking it seriously enough by my estimation. I also think that US emissions are far too high and must be reduced

> I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty

I made no such suggestion, only that China isn't solely responsible for the future of humanity, which was the claim I responded to.

Centralisation also comes with upkeep necessary to maintain centralisation. The cost of that upkeep can severaly limit opportunity for change. If you are a dictator, staying in power is priority one, at the cost of everything else.

Don't worry China and propagandists will just lie about it.

Just like people are doing here.

In reality China is the main reason climate change got worse for the last 20 years. Ask ChatGPT who contributed to CO2 growth most in the past 20 years, Chinese industry was not just the biggest contributor to CO2 emission growth every year but most years bigger than everyone else combined. And the only real exception was 2020, when China shut down a lot faster for COVID, and a LOT more draconian, than everybody else.

Also: China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. Now, I get why (same reason even Germany is considering it), but that doesn't change the facts.

that's really looking at things in the worst possible way. China acquired most of the manufacture of the world, so yeah emission increased, the problem is that they did not decrease where the manifacture was lost.

if you look at co2 emission per capita you can see how China is actually an example to follow, we can't say the same for USA, India or EU. you can ask this to chatgpt, or you could also ... search? for this data, it's publicly available.

> China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. this is misleading, yes they are building coal plants but not using them, that is the backup plan for "rainy days" . and the coal usage is going down.

China has never had a meaningful reduction in per capita carbon emissions. Ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

What are you trying to say with this?

"steps to reduce emissions" is a platitude that sounds nice. they have never actually reduced emissions. they will surpass the US in per capita emissions at this rate within a decade.

They have a plan and they are sinking much of their current fossil fuel use into the largest renewable energy system on the planet.

Compared to, say, rolling back windfarms and redirecting that money (almost a billion) into dodgy neighbours rolling coal ventures.

Your prefer the US approach then?

This has always appeared to be a very measurable situation. Either one is committed to decreasing emissions or they are not. You can just measure emissions over time and compare.

It has never made sense to me that people are willing to ignore the trends and argue in platitudes.

Again, look at the derivatives. Western democracies are currently reducing while China are massively increasing per capita and on track to surpass US per capita in the next decade. Total has long been the more populous countries. The unfortunate truth that presents itself is that if you're not willing to go to war over climate, reduction of consumption is not going to happen.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Yea, if those 5% are the top-5% - everybody else gets inconvenienced by Neo-Liberal policies all the time.

The top 5%/over 60s. The overlap is almost total.

Only in one way. Most rich bastards are over 60, but absolutely no shortage of very poor old people.

Pretty much everything the EU does, is inconveniencing most of its population, often in the name of "climate change" (while not actually making any impact).

Positives: no mobile roaming charges

Negatives:

- less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

- cookie law

- car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

- paper straws

- attached bottle caps

- LED lights

- expensive electricity (a lot of this is caused by individual countries, but probably also the EU plays a role, e.g. by not classifying nuclear as "green" / "renewable" and banning Russian gas)

I wouldn't even mind the speed limit beeping if it was paired with correct data. But the rental car I recently used in Germany actively reduced the engine power when it detected going "over the limit", which was frequrently triggered by e.g. motorway exit lane speed limits being incorrectly parsed. Since there is talk in the EU to actively prohibit going over the limit, this issue needs to be urgently fixed.

Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.

Have you ever visited the EU? Let me help you with the positives: common market, freedom of movement, rule of law, clean and beautiful cities and towns.

Also, war is costly—so is preparedness. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, e.g. you have a strong polity neighboring you that insists your are by gods grace their zone of influence.

I’m sad about nuclear to, but that’s on a culture in specific countries; not on Brussels.

Also, there’s heaps of mistakes in the regulations they churn, but that’s another story.

Not in the EU but have similar regulations

> less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

How exactly are they less efficient?

> cookie law

The fault being those trying to steal my data

> car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

I haven't seen that

> paper straws

I'll give you that one, however in my country its businesses that stopped it just to customer pressure, not a law, indeed it's perfectly legal to serve plastic straws to people, its just people don't ask for them

> attached bottle caps

These are great

> LED lights

These are also great

> expensive electricity

In my country that's due to the price of gas

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