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CO2 has already dropped by nearly 20% in the US over the past decade naturally, as renewables becoming cheaper and buildings, appliances, and manufacturing beco

• tzs 7y ago
  Your second chart shows China appears to be leveling off, at a total level that is a little less that twice the total US emissions. Since they have more than 4x the US population, that means they have quite a bit lower per capita emission, which is a more useful metric than total emissions when assessing how well a country is addressing the issue, since the atmosphere doesn't care about arbitrary political boundaries.
  • jandrewrogers 7y ago
    China also produces much less per capita for that emission. A better metric is productive output per unit of emissions. The metric that matters isn't the per capita emissions but the amount of value generated relative to emissions.
    • tzs 7y ago
      Productive output by what measure? Probably the most immediately obvious choice would be GDP, but upon closer examination I don't think that works. By that measure, using a given amount of emissions running a factory that builds expensive, fossil fuel burning luxury boats for rich playboys is better than using that same emissions to provide winter heat for public schools. Another problem with using a measure of productive output is that it screws developing counties. As I said earlier, the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries. There is some global maximum emissions per year that we can allow if we want to keep climate change from getting out of hand. If we make each country's share of that global pool proportional to their productive output, we are in effect saying that the rich countries get to continue to take advantage of cheap high emission things (like coal), and the poor counties have to forego that for clean but more expensive things, because there is a pretty good correlation between the wealth of a country and its productivity. Since the rich countries are, to a large extent, rich because they exploited those cheap but dirty resources before we knew how harmful that was, it seems to make more moral sense for the rich countries to have to clean up first and/or subsidize the costs to poor countries of going clean. Probably what would be better would be to figure out the total worldwide emissions allowed per year, allocate that among countries on an equal per capita basis, and allow countries to trade their shares.
• vkou 7y ago
  > Unfortunately none of the US/EU cuts will matter in the end with the track China is on. There's an obvious solution to this. Carbon tariffs. If Trump can tariff China for largely nationalistic, non-sense, sore-loser reasons, we almost certainly have the ability to tariff China with actionable reasons (Reduce your carbon emissions, and we will lift the tariffs.) Unfortunately, we actually need to reduce our emissions (Or apply similar penalties to domestic polluters), before we can do something like that.