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> Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded

Uh.. How exactly are countries supposed to decide if they'd "like" to be crowded?

By the way, do you think the matter of simply possessing a large, mostly empty area like Alaska should grant the US an additional "quota" of emissions since it technically reduces US population density?

Not sure what your argument is. We're talking about per capita emissions, not per country emissions, which doesn't even make sense. Why would an arbitrary grouping of human beings like a nation matter in terms of what emissions each individual should be allowed to represent?

> Are you saying the data is simply wrong?

The data only measures cement production and fossil fuel burning, as the caption says. It says nothing about total emissions per capita. Hence the title is wrong, yes.

> The article is about per capita emissions, not household emissions.

Household emissions contribute the largest share of per capita emissions. But hardly any household emissions are measured by "cement production and fossil fuel burning".

> Nobody said it was. What's this got to do with anything?

Burning wood is carbon neutral.

They're not, though. Household emissions are many, many times larger now. Also wood is not a fossil fuel.

These graphs measures "burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production" only, which only represents a fraction of the total emissions in a country. It doesn't measure household emissions or food production. It also heavily favours post-industrial countries compared to countries still in the process of building heavy infrastructure (which requires cement production), like China. These data are biased and self-serving in that sense. US citizens still consume five times more than Chinese citizens in terms of resources, which is unsustainable.

To put it bluntly, what the title says is just not true. This graph measures the "burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production". Cement production and burning of fossil fules only. Hence it is misleading at best. It doesn't at all include household emissions or food production, which represent the largest share emissions, probably indirectly around 80%-90% of all emissions, if we measure the whole life cycle of products consumed.

I.e. what we're seeing here is a tiny fraction of the total carbon footprint. Considering that consumption today in terms of resources per capita has vastly increased, the title is simply a blatantly false statement.

The wild amounts of dollar printing can't continue once the dollar loses its status as world reserve currency, which is happening as we speak as other major nations are gradually moving away from the dollar as a medium for mutual exchange of goods. The national debt continues to haunt the US, and will become an extremely oppressive force on the economy in the future. These plans sounds like a fairy tale. The financial strategy during covid will eventually become off-limits, so long as US remains dependent on import of goods. The US economy will eventually require a complete overhaul, which will be a nightmare for the US, and probably for the rest of the world as well.

The NASA scientists went on and revolutionised the tech and manufacturing industry after the lunar landing. I'd hardly say this is a case of technological supremacy reverting, rather the opposite. The technical expertise developed thereof had massive benefit for US tech and industry sectors.

In terms of societal benefits, the lunar mission had an extremely high cost for little direct benefit. The moon landing was an effort in propaganda, and an effective at that, aimed to show the world that the US was not lagging behind the USSR in terms of technology. But it would have been foolish to go on and continue to spend such a massive amounts of money, and hogging the best scientists and engineers for decades more, with hardly benefits other than ideological ones.

True, congressional report, not government document. Although, government officials seem to agree with these conclusions

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-revi...

The US is really doubling down on the narrative that the WHO has been covering up the epidemic. The pettiness and lack of honesty among US politicians is staggering.

"In the original report, we laid out many of the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) went to great lengths to cover up the initial epidemic, and how their cover-up likely turned what could have been a local outbreak into a global pandemic."

This government document is a really weak attempt to twist the facts. Their conclusion, in direct conflict with the WHO, is:

"While much of the public debate was initially focused on the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan as the origin of the pandemic, the preponderance of evidence now suggests that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

This despite that the WHO after two thorough investigations in Wuhan dismissed the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, and concluded it was unlikely that the virus had originated in Wuhan.

In fact, the Soviet union was there at the time of the US moon landing, as their automated Luna 15 craft crashed into the lunar surface.

Have you ever reflected on the magnitude of American patriotism post-WW2, especially during wartime? Seems to be a major case of widespread, ideological and irrational pro-governmental belief.

Incidentally, there was a lot of simulations of what was going on on television during the time, especially leading up to the landing itself. It may have had something to do with why it got stuck in peoples mind that the entire thing was simulated.

We don't have exact data for the entire product life cycle emissions, but the data I provided give some indications of the difference in scale. What we can see is that

1) Household emissions represent the largest share of global emissions

2) Household emissions are very roughly proportional to expenditure

So while we don't have exact numbers, the 1/5'th estimate is actually roughly on the spot given the disparity in household consumption. I'll also just reiterate my point that temporarily building infrastructure in order to catch up with western countries is not blameworthy in itself. While the production has much room for improval in terms of emissions, it is wrong to blame China for the emissions simply for existing.

At any rate, the narrative that China is the most blameworthy actor falls flat on its face. The take-away should be that, as the German paper mentions, that we must drastically reduce household emissions in order to reach our climate goals.

Instead, the debate is mostly political and one-sided, where the ideal (i.e. most convenient) goal for western policy makers appears to be to put an end to or hamper China's infrastructure projects which are crucial to the welfare of the Chinese people, and by extension, the peoples of other nations affected by the Belt and Road initiative. To me, it suspiciously looks like the climate debate in the media has been to some degree hijacked by forces that seeks to undermine China's Belt and Road initiative.

There is a broader international movement towards using better tracking of product life cycle emissions:

https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/resource-efficiency/what...

Such data, when generally available, will give us a better picture of the overall global situation.

> Just stating dollar based household consumption values seems like a very poor proxy though

I think it is, actually. Western citizens and US citizens in particular does not only have a much higher expenditure of consumer goods, the goods they prefer have higher emissions connected to them also.

Here is a report from 2015 about Germany's average household emissions:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276831049_Regional_...

"Households are either directly or indirectly responsible for the highest share of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions."

The national average was found to be about 15 tons CO2 per capita per year.

Here is a report with data from 2015 regarding China's average household emissions:

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/18/4919/pdf

The national average was ~1.5 tons CO2 per capita per year.

The following article claims 1.7 tons per capita. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3165

Here we can see that China's total household emissions were about 1/10'th of that of Germany in 2015.

The following article compares China’s household emissions compared to UK and Canada

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22114...

“In the years when HCEs were first reported (1995 in China, 1990 in Canada and 1997 in UK), per person HCEs in China, Canada and the UK were 0.54 tCO2, 13.54 tCO2 and 9.63 tCO2, respectively. These values had changed to 1.77 tCO2, 13.14 tCO2, 8.20 tCO2 by the end of reporting (2011 in China and UK and 2007 in Canada),”

As you can see, such analyses paints a very different picture, one where western households appears to be the main driver of global emissions. And thus the focus on production based emissions is largely a red herring, due to the fact that China has to catch up in infrastructure. The emissions tied to western infrastructure have already been emitted.

In essence, China has become the scapegoat of the guilty conscience of the west, who will twist the data in such a way to paint themselves in the most flattering light they can, and China in the worst possible way.

> It assumes that all the benefits of the CO2 emissions accumulate with the country consuming the goods, not the country producing the goods.

All countries have a responsibility for decreasing emissions tied to the production of goods, but all goods are essentially produced for the global market and as such is driven by global demand. Hence consumption is the most important measure when delivering blame. Moreover, if hypothetically western Europe had been forced to produce the goods that China produces (per capita) and vice versa, the emissions tied to European production would rapidly increase, and the production of them would naturally become much dirtier as well due to the limited amount of green energy and cheapness of dirty sources of electricity. So delivering the blame on countries for the production of goods assumes the impossible alternative scenario where the west hypothetically could do a lot better in terms of production. It’s not clear that they could.

Those statistics are very incomplete, as they don't measure the emissions connected to the whole lifecycle of products, but rather seem to track only a weighted average of production based emissions (which appears to be their definition of consumption based emissions).

In order to get a realistic measure, we need to keep track of the whole product lifecycle, from gathering materials and production, to lifetime usage, waste disposal and reabsorption into the earth and atmosphere. This multiplies the total sum of emissions many times over, and heavily disfavours high-consuming per capita countries.

If we compare household consumption rates, China is emitting only a fraction of that of western households. In terms of money spent, consumption per capita of the US is about 6-7 times larger than that of China.

The talk about China is predictively ignorant and in conflict with facts. Since you're still mentioning total emissions instead of per capita emissions, I can only assume you have a political axe to grind.

These statistics don't take into account consumption based emissions, only production based emissions (except oil production, I believe). Western countries have outsourced their production to developing countries (which looks nice for them on emission graphs), but their consumption based emissions are steadily rising. If you take into account trade of goods as well as production of goods, it's not as nice of a picture as those graphs would have you believe.

> But western countries emissions have been gradually declining while China's has been increasing rapidly.

This is a half-truth. Production based emissions have gone down in western countries and up in China. However, this doesn't take into account consumption based emissions, i.e. imported products, which are extremely high in western countries, and only going up. Western countries exporting production to developing countries does not absolve them of responsibility just because it looks nice on graphs. Unfortunately, the whole global emissions story only takes into account production based emissions, except for oil production, which AFAIK is measured as consumption based emissions (very convenient for some western countries, like the US).

> And China is just as aggressive, did you forget about the recent Microsoft hacking scandal?

The scope of US intelligence clandestine operations, including hacking, vastly exceed the entire worlds clandestine operations combined. Just as their military budget and activity does. We know this by Snowden's leaks. By Wikileaks. The US even regularly hacks western companies and governments (not to speak of non-western companies and governments), as well as forcing all US companies (by law) of handing them whatever information they demand. The entire US tech sector (including Google and Microsoft) is an enormous sink of information directly accessible to the US intelligence community. The scope of the crime of US intelligence is so enormous it can't even be compared to other nations.

> Versus China who supports autocratic regimes such as North Korea and Syria who repress their populations with death and suffering?

It's the US that keeps Syria in perpetual war. Whatever you think about the Syrian government, a country in war is way worse. It simply can't be compared in terms of human suffering.

> was mainly Arab nation's citizens to topple their regimes

NATO literally bombed Libya to dust, which resulted in creating the largest slave market in the world, and enormous human suffering. It's a terrible, awful situation for millions of people, who actually enjoyed peace and European-like material living conditions under Gaddafi. If we put this on a scale and compare, you'd have to be a pentagon war hawk or a totally ignorant person to prefer the former.

> And at the end of the day, it was the Chinese government trying to cover up the disease from WHO

Absolutely not, western corporate media certainly fronted that narrative, which actually triggered WHO researchers themselves to come out publicly and deny it, because it's simply a false narrative. The WHO leadership has literally praised China all along for their transparency and openness. As have the teams of WHO researchers who have visited China for investigations. The media narrative (as well as White House announcements) is the opposite, in direct conflict with the facts on the ground.

Not really. The lab leak theory was always dismissed by the WHO team of researches. However, I brought up the fact that the virus unlikely originated in Wuhan according to the WHO researches as an additional piece of evidence of how unlikely the Wuhan lab leak theory is.

That quote indicates precisely what I said, that researches are up in the air about the probable place of origin of Covid.

The symptoms are quite similar actually.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

"The paper emphasises that EVALI remains a diagnosis of exclusion, highlighting the importance of thorough history taking, especially given that symptoms and clinical manifestations overlap with those of some infectious respiratory diseases, including COVID-19."

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...

In addition, vaping seriously increases risk of serious illness by Covid.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/08/vaping-linked...

And what conflict of interest is that?

It's generally understood that due to the major overlap in symptoms, the lung illness from the vaping disease could easily have been misdiagnosed cases of Covid. This due to the fact that Covid was unknown. Misdiagnoses are extremely common during outbreaks, which is well-known. I never claimed this as evidence, only as a possible indication which is consistent with the thesis.

Besides, vaping demonstrably leads to a higher risk of serious lung illness by Covid:

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/researchers-find-n...

Again, not evidence per se, but it is consistent with the thesis.

The first confirmed Covid cases were in Wuhan, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the place of origination. The lead researcher of the WHO team says himself it's unlikely to have originated in Wuhan, and indicated that it has probably originated from elsewhere, possibly in other countries.

"https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-who-china..."

> Credible genetic analysis of the virus shows nearly incontrovertibly that it originated in Wuhan.

What are you talking about? That's just not true. There is zero incontrovertible evidence that it originated in Wuhan.

"https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-who-china..."

'“The possible path from whatever original animal species all the way through to the Huanan market could have taken a very long and convoluted path involving also movements across borders,” Embarek told a nearly three-hour media briefing.

Embarek said work to identify the coronavirus’s origins points to a natural reservoir in bats, but it is unlikely that they were in Wuhan.'

- Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team of independent WHO experts in Wuhan.

Reddit is definitely not the whole world. It's heavily dominated by people from the US and western europe, and heavily biased towards the the mainstream western propaganda narrative. Reddit is an active target for propagandists (i.e. intelligence communities). Votes and recommendations for news articles are not at all based purely on interest and activity, it's being pushed by actors with various agendas.

No they haven't, it's simply one possible explanation. It's still be "best" (i.e. most convenient) theory. Besides, these "attacks" even happened in Washington DC. Was that Russia also? Who did it, how did they do it, and where are the weapons? Russia is the US's favorite boogeyman, and I'm sure they will "retaliate" through economic sanctions or military intervention. In all likelihood, the Havana Syndrome is a fabricated narrative and mere pretext for unilateral aggression.

Consider the last paraphraph of the article:

> "Most importantly, if and when more evidence is gathered, Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, and their officers must be held to account."

This is not "news", it is war propaganda. Besides, it's immensely hypocritical. When was American government and intelligence officials ever held to account for orchestrating and instigating violent aggression abroad?

>Even just with the evidence made public, it's the most plausible explanation.

It's not the most plausible explanation, but it is the most convenient one. It shifts the blame and reinforces the narrative. They don't even have a coherent idea regarding how such a weapon would work in practice, it's pure speculation.

I don't think you're following.

We're talking about evidence for an attack.