Comment by indoordin0saur
2 days ago
This actually has me just as concerned as rising temperatures. And its a pretty hard thing to argue against, no matter your politics. Elon even brought it up when he did that interview with Trump in late 2024 to convince him that we should still care about CO2 levels in the atmosphere, even if you think the threat of a changing climate is overblown. Trump really had no response.
USA (along with the rest of the western world) is a huge cumulative emitter:
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
But a distant second in per year emissions:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes.
It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to us, buying Chinese products.
The cumulative emissions represent the PPM increase today. So that's a very relevant statistic. I don't know why you're ignoring it.
China also reduced their emissions last year while the US increased them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
Stop pointing fingers. Start working.
figuring out who to blame is not the problem here, we need to figure out how to fix it.
The EU isn't listed, because the EU is not a country.
Sorting the table by "per capita" is much more interesting IMHO.