Comment by Alifatisk
6 months ago
Good news for China, bad news for US. But don't forget China still emit 16B compared to US who emit 6B tons of CO2
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pollution...
6 months ago
Good news for China, bad news for US. But don't forget China still emit 16B compared to US who emit 6B tons of CO2
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pollution...
> But don't forget China still emit 16B compared to US who emit 6B tons of CO2
China has 1.4 billion people, while U.S. has 340 million people.
And China makes all of our stuff. Instead of putting tariffs on solar from China, we should have dropped a trillion dollars on it and put it everywhere.
Before you drop a trillion dollars, you do a cost benefit analysis and you factor for switching costs, the unique geography and population distribution of the U.S. the expected lifespan of solar panels, the battery install capacity necessary to facilitate nighttime and 100 to 1000 year weather event emergencies, the capacity to keep the grid online in the event of a world war, the cost to install HV lines to transport from solar hubs, etc.
You don't dogmatically order $1 trillion of something and sacrifice a functional independent, diverse, weather resilient, geographically distributed energy grid thats served the nation that invented the light bulb for over 125 years, because you read a clickbait headline about China.
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Per capita is a better metric but it's worth noting that China is world's factory - it's easy to reduce emissions if you offshore a lot of your production elsewhere...
And China has the US beat per capita in emissions.
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And the US, like most of the West, had outsourced their most carbon intensive manufacturing.
And looking at historical emissions, US contributed 25% of all emissions vs China 15%.
Emissions impact the whole world, not only the country that emit them. And the relevant metric is not per country, but per inhabitant in this country.
Not really. Otherwise, US could slash its "relevant metrics" by annexing Nigeria.
And China could slash the metrics you believe are "relevant" by dividing into 20 countries. It's time to stop talking and start doing. China is doing.
Except that does make sense because the new country would be the weighted average of the average CO2 contribution for both Americans and Nigerians.
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So tell me why are you using absolute numbers?
Those are the numbers that matter. Percentages are how you lie with statistics.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
There is a great book on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
But you have to know enough statistics to be sneaky with it.
Globally, the total matters. By country, the per capita matters.
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What matters is that the US' number keeps growing.
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China has a lot more people than the US. In fact, the per capita CO2 production is way more in the US.
adjust that for the population...
Most of Chinese emissions are due to the production of American products.
Not just American products.