Comment by myrmidon
15 hours ago
> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.
What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).
If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!
There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.
Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.
> Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?
Air pollution (from smog) in India is already at a "seasonally deadly" level. If you haven't been to India during late autumn, it's hard to imagine how bad it is. Your eyes burn and every breath stings, you literally taste the acrid smog all the time.
India is working hard to get that down. It's a much more tangible and immediate problem there than the thought some parts of the country may become so hot as to be unliveable. Addressing thst, in India, is a side effect / a benefit of cleaning up the air, as much as energy autarky via Solar PV has the benefit of becoming independent of oil imports. India has coal. Lots of it. It's cheap to them. It doesn't particularly want to use more of it because of the associated air pollution and also because cooling water for thermal power plants competes with drinking water for people in some places.
Personally I think India is rather pragmatic here. Battery banks for scooters in the cities? tick. Buildout of PV? tick. Electric car charging stations? tick. Replacing wood, coal and other dirty cooking fuel by gas? Also tick. India just doesn't bother fighting some internal culture wars about how great fossil fuels or renewables are. They just move ahead more or less silently.
Even for a giant country like India you control <20% of global population, and you are responsible for much less than 20% of the effect (climate change).
So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?
Because much more of their land will become uninhabitable.
And also we should be helping them.
Which leader do you think is more likely to get elected by the populace? The one who tells the destitute Indians they must suffer more, lest their home be lost, or the one who says it’s America’s fault, and that they should pay in MANY ways for what they’re doing to the Indians’ home?
And besides, what do you think they’re going to do? Give up their highly efficient motor bikes? Destroy their personal businesses and starve? How far do you think we could push them? Maybe we could convince them all to just die to make room for our pollution and their nuclear-backed army will agree happily.
I swear half the arguments I see are just completely lacking in regard for the fact that this is happening in the real world, and not a vacuum.
You miss the fact that China's GDP per capita is 1/6th the US. So to produce 1/6th per person they emits 2/3rds the CO2. Which means in total, the thing that matters, is that china produces 4 times the CO2 with no end in sight. They are 99% to blame for the current situation.
No they're 15% to blame for the current situation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
The EU-27 is 17% to blame.
The US is 24% to blame.
Yesterday's CO2 emissions cause today's problems. Today's CO2 emissions will cause tomorrow's problems.
If total matters then it's historic total per capita where US is (far) ahead, "current" is 100s of years on climate scale. Unless one insists on only stats that makes PRC to blame. All per capita GDP vs per captial emissions reflects is PRC gdp per capita (btw PPP is 1/3 US) is massively underreported, i.e. comports with other proxy indicators like how PRC consume a lot of goods at per capita rates higher than 1/6 nominal and 1/3 per capita would suggest.
... so if you are some poor rice farmer, you should be forbidden from even heating in winter, but if you're rich enough, flying around the globe all day is a-ok?
I'm not sure exactly how this sounds like a good argument to you, but I can assure you most certainly that less wealthy persons will not find it convincing.
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What do you even mean by "arguing at scale"?
I have a point and numbers to back it up, I don't see either on your side.
> US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each
The problem the US has per-capita is lower population density. The majority of the US population lives in suburban or rural areas without mass transit and changing that on the relevant timescale is not feasible. It also has major population centers in areas that experience winter and thereby have higher energy costs for heating, exacerbated by the lower population density (more square feet of indoor space to heat per capita), with the same infeasible timescale for changing that.
As a result, the only way to fix it is to switch to other forms of energy rather than having any real hope of significantly reducing consumption in terms of GWh. Use more electric cars and hybrids, generate electricity using solar, wind and nuclear, switch from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps for heating, etc. But that's largely what's happening. The percentage of hybrid vehicles goes up, despite Trump's posturing nobody actually wants coal, ~100% of net new generation capacity in recent years is solar and wind and even when new natural gas plants are built, they're displacing old coal fired ones, which results in a net reduction in CO2. It would be nice if this would happen faster, but at least the number is going in the right direction.
The problem China has is that they've been building brand new coal fired power plants at scale. WTF.
Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different. The latter is denying agency in the situation.
> Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different.
The impossible part of "problem solved in 50+ years" is the 50+ years when you need it to be solved sooner than that, and it can be solved sooner than that by doing something else, namely electrifying heating and transportation and using renewables and nuclear to generate electricity.
We're kinda doing that, through zoning requirements and NIMBY politics. It is, as predicted, very unpopular, and has a number of unfortunate side effects like rising homelessness, declining fertility, and increasing inflation.
On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.
You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a schmuck for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.
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