Comment by Frogeman
17 hours ago
The majority of pollution is caused by 3rd world/ eastern countries.
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
17 hours ago
The majority of pollution is caused by 3rd world/ eastern countries.
Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
Over the past century, the US has produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other country, and it's not even close.
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
It's still not that close. 15% for China vs 24% for just the US. Add in the EU-27 and it's 41%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
> and their emissions are growing.
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
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If this was the stated rationale and goal of the trade war, I'd be all for it. This is exactly the kind of situation tariffs are for.
Tariffs on goods the world pays China to make which drives up emissions?
I don't see why war is necessary. There could be something like the Space Race, where nations flex their technological skills at producing solutions to environmental problems.
That race already started, but China is the only one participating at the moment. The US has been running backwards, though.
China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do
Global warming doesn't care about 'per capita'.
Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
There is literally no charitable interpretation of this point.
How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.
If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).
And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.
This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".
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> Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
That is why per capita is the correct measure.
The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.
Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.
We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.
The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.
And it also doesn’t care about arbitrary country boundaries. But it is affected by total emissions, and per-capita measurements is one fair way to judge how a country is doing
It also doesn't care about arbitrary groupings of humans (a.k.a countries).
The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.
> global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere
And yet you say "historical emissions" is bullshit. How do you think we got to the current co2 PPM level?
The comment i replied to does
And they make most of the stuff we buy, including the climate emissions involved in making them.