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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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