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Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

280 points by jsingleton 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jsingleton 7y ago
The data comes from https://climateactiontracker.org/ https://climateactiontracker.org/, specifically https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/ https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/ (where you can download a spreadsheet).
sarbaz 7y ago
So, is there any convincing reason to think that any emissions targets will be met? Does anyone buy the line in the article about India? Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?
- Scarblac 7y ago
  There is no reason to think they will be met, on current trends -- global output is still increasing, and new "green" energy seems to just come on top of fossil fuel energy, not replacing it. But it makes no sense to spend money on the effects while the rate at which they're getting worse is still increasing. Like starting to repaint the house while the fire is still blazing. We just need to do a lot more, keeping fossil fuel in the ground forever will always be more effective than any measures to live with the consequences.
- currymj 7y ago
  even if we miss a target, more emissions beyond that target still make things much worse. it's not like we can just declare bankruptcy or something. ultimately we have to reduce emissions as much as possible while preparing for their impact -- and I am not an expert, but I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.
  - sarbaz 7y ago
    > I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects. I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK. And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
    - mempko 7y ago
      All but one major extinction event in the past was because of global warming. What you are missing is that during those times , the temperature change was over a much longer period of time than now. What we are doing is unprecedented and there is little reason to believe anything will flourish.
      - sarbaz 7y ago
        But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000
    - currymj 7y ago
      i think the idea of reducing emissions is to reach a new equilibrium as quickly as possible, and one as close as possible to our current climate which we know is pretty good. climate change is likely not going to destroy all civilization (notwithstanding sensationalistic New York Magazine article) but adding decades or centuries of "adjustment" -- droughts, floods, crop failures, less predictable extreme weather, displacement of people in coastal regions -- is likely to be very expensive. hard to imagine that all this cost over several generations is outweighed by oil and coal being somewhat cheaper than renewables/nuclear.
    - 7y ago
- familysized 7y ago
  What's wrong with the line about India? It's absolutely correct - per capita emissions from India are very small. > Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Looking at a country's total emissions makes no sense because the population needs to be taken into account. India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low. Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the total sum of emissions... So "India eventually [having] the largest total emissions" means a huge extra tonnage of emissions will be added to the already troubling amounts... So, the per capita number is mainly relevant in regards to fairness...
    - familysized 7y ago
      > Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the total sum of emissions... True. How about reducing the extremely high per-capita emissions of developed countries? That will result in a huge drop in the total sum of emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... People in such countries are taking up too many resources and that is not sustainable for the planet. There needs to be a carbon tax.
    - reitzensteinm 7y ago
      What the Earth doesn't care about is the arbitrary lines in the sand we declare to be this nation or that.
      - wtdata 7y ago
        What Earth does care about, is when you decide that's a good idea to have on average more than 4 children per couple over the last 2 generations in India [1] instead of only 2 or even less children per couple like in USA or the EU [2]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert... Every country has a set of natural resources at its disposal. It should manage and cherish those resources and not overtax them. If a country decides it's a good idea to perpetually grow their population when all they have are the same set of natural resources available, then well, the onus is on them to figure out how to do it without destroying everything.
- jsingleton 7y ago
  There is an interesting bit here about exporting the problem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9zSsR/road_to_clean_energy#group-Exporting-the-problem-dvkyuW6VWJ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9zSsR/road_to_clean_en... Regarding China: "It’s the world’s biggest burner of coal, but it’s also the biggest global investor in renewables." Keep in mind that China is the world's factory and a lot of services (IT etc.) are performed in India, so they are not just national emissions but emissions that we have offshored.
- chimprich 7y ago
  > Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change? No. The numbers have been crunched. Averting climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the effects. Even if that wasn't the case, you don't just deal with the effects and then get on with civilisation. You still have the effects, and you're still faced with the same problems in the future. In case that didn't persuade on an emotional level, here's an analogy for that last point: a doctor points out to you that you're putting on weight at a dangerous rate. Sure, you could manage it by buying bigger clothes and taking medication for blood pressure and cholesterol, but if you're still overeating (and accelerating the rate at which you're gaining weight) then you haven't solved the problem. You have all the inconvenience and expense of dealing with the effects, and the problem is getting worse.
- asaegyn 7y ago
  https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/16/china-is-doing-a-lot-better-on-climate-action-than-most-people-realize https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/16/china-is-doing-a-lot-be... As long as GDP is related to emissions and globally advanced countries engage in zero sum competition, exploiting others by pressing their historical power advantage, there is a very strong incentive for China, India and the rest of the developing to catch up by any means necessary.
coldtea 7y ago
>A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. When countries have made real progress "toward limiting greenhouse-gas emission" one would not need charts to see it: it would be immediately evident in everyday lifestyles, consumer habits, and energy use...
- jsingleton 7y ago
  This is the number that shows if we are making progress or not: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ Spoiler, we're not. It's getting worse and it's accelerating. Interactive graph: https://www.co2levels.org/ https://www.co2levels.org/
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Not necessarily. For example just switching over coal-fired plants to gas-fired plants reduces carbon emissions by 50%. (This is a big reason why the US's emissions have decelerated since 2000.) Yet that would be almost entirely invisible at the consumer level.
  - phtrivier 7y ago
    Moreover, I would actually argue that the only way we're going to affect climate change is if we find at least one big slice of emissions that can be reduced without having to change habits or going against engrained values too much. In order of what will probably work best: * Something barely noticeable (eg: any improvement in electricity production that does not make the customer's price skyrocket.) * Something noticeable but not fundamentally annoying (Pay people to get electric vehicles, Norway-style. Make a large part of your transportation public and electric.) * Something noticeable, but fun . I don't have a big idea on this one, and it kinda sucks. * Something noticeable, and that "gets you laid" (tm). Something along the lines of "I have a Tesla. You should have sex with me.", but scalable. If someone finds this, we're saved. The last one would be even more powerful as it could reshape at least some people's identity into "I'm the kind of person who care about climate change", so all the other changes that actually require discomfort could get rationalized away (apparently, we're pretty good at this as a species.) So maybe someone needs to organize Vegan Supermodel Orgies as well as marching in NY. Just saying.
perfunctory 7y ago
Climate crisis is getting scarier and scarier by the day. Don't know about you guys but I am done with sitting behind my computer and whining about what "they" should or shouldn't do. I am joining Extinction Rebellion.
- jsingleton 7y ago
  Do it. https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-climage-change/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-... > In the end power is social. Power comes from people showing up to meetings, people showing up for rallies, people going door-to-door convincing other people to vote for the right person or support the right initiative, people blocking roads and making a fuss. > And that takes time and money. If you work in tech you probably have a surplus of both.
- colinyoung 7y ago
  Good, I did too
mattigames 7y ago
Is so obvious where this is all going: The wealthy -the factories owners and their close allies- the very same ones ignoring the pledges to stop contributing to climate change will be the only ones protected enough from most damages of climate change, only the wealthy will afford to live in the cities with livable temperature, to buy potable water, only the most resilient of the poor and middle-class will survive, and their youngsters will be used as soldiers to fight for natural resources, some of their families will enjoy those resources but only enough to breed more soldiers to keep the wars going.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence. The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets. Let's be very conservative and assume global GDP per capita grows at 2% per year. In the baseline scenario, the median world citizen would still be 390% richer than the average person today. Applying the worst global warming impact (20% of GDP), the median person would still be 290% richer than the average person today. Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-global-economic-growth-new-study-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...
  - jsingleton 7y ago
    Talking about things in terms of GDP glosses over the human suffering that it represents. > a 10% increase in per capita real income is associated with a 1.5% decrease in the crude death rate It seems reasonable to assume that the inverse is also true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...
jwr 7y ago
How is this not the #1 story? Why do we even bother with all the other trivia?
- jsingleton 7y ago
  I think you have perfectly summed up the thoughts of all the school strikers.
- taberiand 7y ago
  Not only is it not the #1 story, it's not even visible now.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Because it's a coordination problem. So you can't actually add marginal value by adding marginal contribution.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  In general or on HN? In general - damned if I know. On HN? We've been having a climate story on a front page pretty much every day for a while now.
carapace 7y ago
Flagging climate stories? WTF?
- jsingleton 7y ago
  Perhaps a vested interest controls lots of accounts on here and wants to bury stories of this nature (pun not intended)? The comments don't appear to have descended into a flame war so I suspect a bot net has manually flagged it to death. I've seen it a lot on here and it makes me think it's not worth engaging with HN any more.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Nah, see? The mods got up Monday morning and put the kibosh on the hijiinks.
dwaltrip 7y ago
This shouldn't be flagged. Is there any way to vouch that a story shouldn't be flagged?
kossTKR 7y ago
The fact that articles from Nature are getting flagged now is beyond dark. Vested interests, desperate denial or plain delusion?
- QuitterStrip 7y ago
  It seems discussion on climate change is being discouraged on hn. An article from the BBC was also flagged. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054
- asaegyn 7y ago
  Seems like consistent suppression of climate related news on hackernews increasing noticeably over the past few months.
jsingleton 7y ago
The UN Climate Action Summit 2019 is live online http://webtv.un.org/ http://webtv.un.org/ or https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/ https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/
eloff 7y ago
I've thought a lot about climate change and it's consequences. If we trigger runaway warming through feedback loops involved permafrost and ocean (hydrates) methane - things are going to get really, really bad. This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. Clearly if that happens, we're really in trouble. I don't know how likely that is, or what the trigger point would be. The climate today is not the same as it was 250M years ago. On the other side of the coin, the Earth is uncomfortably cool these last few million years. We have these repeated periods of glaciation. Having Europe, Russia, Canada, and the northern US ground to dust beneath kilometers of ice would be a bit of tragedy too on a similar scale. That it's further away in the future doesn't make it less of a problem - if we're too aggressive solving climate change we could imagine a future where we have to deliberately pump methane into the atmosphere to stave off an ice age. For better or worse we seem to be at no risk of this through our ineptitude in responding to climate change. For people worried about coral reefs dying, it happened less than 10K year ago at the end of the last ice age. Sea level rose 400ft and drowned the world's coral reefs. They bounced back, as you can see today. They will also bounce back from climate change - it will just suck in the meanwhile. There are undoubtedly things we can and will do to make it suck less, like developing heat resistant corals, planting reefs further north/south, etc. For people worried about coastal cities being submerged, relax, you'll be dead by then. Long term, we should be moving our investment to more sustainable areas. But infrastructure doesn't last forever anyway, so I think a lot of that may occur naturally as people just stop developing new infrastructure in low-lying areas. There's no question it will cost us though. If you're really worried about climate change for your descendants, get Canadian citizenship. That's one of the few countries likely to benefit from climate change. So to sum up, climate change is not all bad, just mostly bad, until or unless it runs away on us, and then the doomsayers may be right for a change.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. That's a theory for what happened, but as I understand it the cause of this extinction has not been conclusively proved.
carapace 7y ago
You don't have to wait for anybody. Maybe the most important thing to know is that we can make carbon-neutral alcohol fuel, and, integrated into regenerative agriculture ("Permaculture" et. al.) the economics are totally different than large-scale industrial ethanol production. Think Community-Supported-Agriculture that supplies your gas. Dave "Farmer Dave" Bloom collected all the necessary info into a book (that was banned from public tv at the time!) http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ Get the book, find or start your local fuel co-op! - - - - For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture". Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either. - - - - See also https://www.greenwave.org/our-work https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs? - - - - For more inspiration and projects search "Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert"
Bantros 7y ago
Fucking lol
eledumb 7y ago
Reducing output isn't going to happen, well it won't happen until it's too late. It's like the smoker that gets diagnosed with cancer, and then decides to quite smoking. It's also ludicrous that think that warming will stop and hold at 1.5 or 2.0c adding less won't stop the increase in climate warming, it will just cause the increase to be slower. The other thing that's ludicrous is that we aren't monitoring the earth's output, the warming oceans, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost are now contributing greenhouse gases due to the warming climate, they are now locked into positive feedback loops. Which means every cycle the changes get a little bit bigger as the cycles feed themselves. Unless we can start to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere these feedback loops are just going to keep running.
joshuaheard 7y ago
It looks like if you take China and India out of the equation, the numbers are trending down.
- riffraff 7y ago
  If you take China and India out of the equation you are removing a lot of goods which are used in the rest of the world, though.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Including a big fraction (most, I think) of solar capacity installed around the world.
  - jajag 7y ago
    This is a whole part of the problem. Globalisation and the offshoring of manufacturing to the east has meant a corresponding offset of emissions from the Europe and the US to China and other places. We in the West have to take some responsibility for this. You can argue that globalisation does have a noble goal - i.e. to reduce global inequality by raising the standard of living of all to that of the most well-off nations - but the now obvious trends of climate change, global heating and emissions, are showing this to be a dangerous and unobtainable goal. It seems to me that we have to start looking at reductions of living standards in the West (to maybe what we had 30-40 years ago) with corresponding reductions in global trade. I have little confidence that we can actually achieve this in an organized and equitable manner.
nostromo 7y ago
Actually a lot of progress has been made, except in China, which has increased emissions to the point of reversing all other progress globally. By comparison, US carbon has been going down since 2007, despite a growing population and economy. Per capita it's been declining for over four decades. China now emits more than the US and EU combined, despite having much, much less economic output.
- uoaei 7y ago
  Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the destination country, not the production country. China supplies the world a lot of goods. It doesn't seem appropriate to put the onus on China when the end result of that production run brings all that stuff over to another country.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    > Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the destination country, not the production country. Has anybody studied this yet? This point comes up every time this issue is discussed, but I don't remember ever seeing any effort into quantifying what the situation looks like from this perspective.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Unavoidable. They're playing catch up. It seems fairly obvious to me that we should say "Total emissions by some date (say 2080) should equal some value (say X) and we calculate from the Industrial Age to that date and apportion according to what percentage of the Earth you own". The West polluted from 1900 to 2020 and reaped the rewards. The cutbacks The West must make must be proportional. Otherwise it's like inheriting all your wealth from a thief and then making thievery a blanket crime.
Mikeb85 7y ago
So who wants to volunteer to have their living conditions drastically reduced? The west likes to blame China and India, places we've outsourced manufacturing and work to and yet somehow they still produce far less CO2 per capita. We shame people into reducing their individual emissions while ignoring the fact that industry produces most of the emissions. The fact is, no country is going to take drastic measures. We don't know exactly what's going to happen when the world warms 3 degrees (we have ideas, but the world has been both warmer and colder in the past, and somehow life survived). We do however know what would happen if we suddenly stunted economic progress tomorrow (nothing good).
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  I will. I think you are missing quite a bit of research on what a 3 deg C/6 deg F warmer world looks like. It will stunt economic growth a lot more than voluntary measures. edit: "The west likes to blame China and India, places we've outsourced manufacturing and work to and yet somehow they still produce far less CO2 per capita. We shame people into reducing their individual emissions while ignoring the fact that industry produces most of the emissions." do you see how you are contradicting yourself here saying that placed we've outsource industry to have lower per capita CO2 emissions. Can you clarify that?
- about_help 7y ago
  This argument is tired. We can maintain 1st world living conditions while drastically reducing emissions. Throw away consumerism is literally a toxic force on the planet, but the wealthy do not want to disrupt their income streams and "gamble" their fortunes on reinvestment or environmental rehabilitation. Your argument is akin to "why don't you donate all your money" when someone says the rich should be taxed more heavily.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Sounds like you're always the first one to reply to anything climate related with some false dichotomy. We can make changes without adjusting living conditions drastically - moving to EVs, removing fossil fuel subsidies, pushing solar over coal/gas. In fact, we might improve our living conditions by reducing our addition to oil, as long as it's managed and not cold-turkey.
neves 7y ago
USA and Canada have more than the double of emissions per capita than China. While these countries doesn't take the responsibility for climate change, nothing will change.
- hollerith 7y ago
  The US and Canada should definitely take more responsibility for climate change, but I trust emissions numbers coming out of China about as much as I trusted economic numbers coming out of the Soviet Union.
- dade_ 7y ago
  There should also be a factor for land mass when considering "fairness", but reality is that the tar sands are the cause of our growing ghg emmissions. Even the industry's propaganda site claims it is single handedly responsible for 10% of Canada's emmisions: https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-topics/ghg-emissions https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-topics/ghg-emissio... I can only imagine how much money they spend trying to rebrand tarsands as oilsands...

280 points by jsingleton 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

The data comes from https://climateactiontracker.org/ https://climateactiontracker.org/, specifically https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/ https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/ (where you can download a spreadsheet).

sarbaz 7y ago

So, is there any convincing reason to think that any emissions targets will be met? Does anyone buy the line in the article about India? Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?

Scarblac 7y ago
There is no reason to think they will be met, on current trends -- global output is still increasing, and new "green" energy seems to just come on top of fossil fuel energy, not replacing it. But it makes no sense to spend money on the effects while the rate at which they're getting worse is still increasing. Like starting to repaint the house while the fire is still blazing. We just need to do a lot more, keeping fossil fuel in the ground forever will always be more effective than any measures to live with the consequences.
currymj 7y ago
even if we miss a target, more emissions beyond that target still make things much worse. it's not like we can just declare bankruptcy or something. ultimately we have to reduce emissions as much as possible while preparing for their impact -- and I am not an expert, but I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.
- sarbaz 7y ago
  > I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects. I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK. And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
  - mempko 7y ago
    All but one major extinction event in the past was because of global warming. What you are missing is that during those times , the temperature change was over a much longer period of time than now. What we are doing is unprecedented and there is little reason to believe anything will flourish.
    - sarbaz 7y ago
      But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000
  - currymj 7y ago
    i think the idea of reducing emissions is to reach a new equilibrium as quickly as possible, and one as close as possible to our current climate which we know is pretty good. climate change is likely not going to destroy all civilization (notwithstanding sensationalistic New York Magazine article) but adding decades or centuries of "adjustment" -- droughts, floods, crop failures, less predictable extreme weather, displacement of people in coastal regions -- is likely to be very expensive. hard to imagine that all this cost over several generations is outweighed by oil and coal being somewhat cheaper than renewables/nuclear.
  - 7y ago
familysized 7y ago
What's wrong with the line about India? It's absolutely correct - per capita emissions from India are very small. > Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Looking at a country's total emissions makes no sense because the population needs to be taken into account. India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low. Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the total sum of emissions... So "India eventually [having] the largest total emissions" means a huge extra tonnage of emissions will be added to the already troubling amounts... So, the per capita number is mainly relevant in regards to fairness...
  - familysized 7y ago
    > Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the total sum of emissions... True. How about reducing the extremely high per-capita emissions of developed countries? That will result in a huge drop in the total sum of emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... People in such countries are taking up too many resources and that is not sustainable for the planet. There needs to be a carbon tax.
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    What the Earth doesn't care about is the arbitrary lines in the sand we declare to be this nation or that.
    - wtdata 7y ago
      What Earth does care about, is when you decide that's a good idea to have on average more than 4 children per couple over the last 2 generations in India [1] instead of only 2 or even less children per couple like in USA or the EU [2]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert... Every country has a set of natural resources at its disposal. It should manage and cherish those resources and not overtax them. If a country decides it's a good idea to perpetually grow their population when all they have are the same set of natural resources available, then well, the onus is on them to figure out how to do it without destroying everything.
jsingleton 7y ago
There is an interesting bit here about exporting the problem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9zSsR/road_to_clean_energy#group-Exporting-the-problem-dvkyuW6VWJ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9zSsR/road_to_clean_en... Regarding China: "It’s the world’s biggest burner of coal, but it’s also the biggest global investor in renewables." Keep in mind that China is the world's factory and a lot of services (IT etc.) are performed in India, so they are not just national emissions but emissions that we have offshored.
chimprich 7y ago
> Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change? No. The numbers have been crunched. Averting climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the effects. Even if that wasn't the case, you don't just deal with the effects and then get on with civilisation. You still have the effects, and you're still faced with the same problems in the future. In case that didn't persuade on an emotional level, here's an analogy for that last point: a doctor points out to you that you're putting on weight at a dangerous rate. Sure, you could manage it by buying bigger clothes and taking medication for blood pressure and cholesterol, but if you're still overeating (and accelerating the rate at which you're gaining weight) then you haven't solved the problem. You have all the inconvenience and expense of dealing with the effects, and the problem is getting worse.
asaegyn 7y ago
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/16/china-is-doing-a-lot-better-on-climate-action-than-most-people-realize https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/16/china-is-doing-a-lot-be... As long as GDP is related to emissions and globally advanced countries engage in zero sum competition, exploiting others by pressing their historical power advantage, there is a very strong incentive for China, India and the rest of the developing to catch up by any means necessary.

coldtea 7y ago

>A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. When countries have made real progress "toward limiting greenhouse-gas emission" one would not need charts to see it: it would be immediately evident in everyday lifestyles, consumer habits, and energy use...

jsingleton 7y ago
This is the number that shows if we are making progress or not: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ Spoiler, we're not. It's getting worse and it's accelerating. Interactive graph: https://www.co2levels.org/ https://www.co2levels.org/
dcolkitt 7y ago
Not necessarily. For example just switching over coal-fired plants to gas-fired plants reduces carbon emissions by 50%. (This is a big reason why the US's emissions have decelerated since 2000.) Yet that would be almost entirely invisible at the consumer level.
- phtrivier 7y ago
  Moreover, I would actually argue that the only way we're going to affect climate change is if we find at least one big slice of emissions that can be reduced without having to change habits or going against engrained values too much. In order of what will probably work best: * Something barely noticeable (eg: any improvement in electricity production that does not make the customer's price skyrocket.) * Something noticeable but not fundamentally annoying (Pay people to get electric vehicles, Norway-style. Make a large part of your transportation public and electric.) * Something noticeable, but fun . I don't have a big idea on this one, and it kinda sucks. * Something noticeable, and that "gets you laid" (tm). Something along the lines of "I have a Tesla. You should have sex with me.", but scalable. If someone finds this, we're saved. The last one would be even more powerful as it could reshape at least some people's identity into "I'm the kind of person who care about climate change", so all the other changes that actually require discomfort could get rationalized away (apparently, we're pretty good at this as a species.) So maybe someone needs to organize Vegan Supermodel Orgies as well as marching in NY. Just saying.

perfunctory 7y ago

Climate crisis is getting scarier and scarier by the day. Don't know about you guys but I am done with sitting behind my computer and whining about what "they" should or shouldn't do. I am joining Extinction Rebellion.

jsingleton 7y ago
Do it. https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-climage-change/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-... > In the end power is social. Power comes from people showing up to meetings, people showing up for rallies, people going door-to-door convincing other people to vote for the right person or support the right initiative, people blocking roads and making a fuss. > And that takes time and money. If you work in tech you probably have a surplus of both.
colinyoung 7y ago
Good, I did too

mattigames 7y ago

Is so obvious where this is all going: The wealthy -the factories owners and their close allies- the very same ones ignoring the pledges to stop contributing to climate change will be the only ones protected enough from most damages of climate change, only the wealthy will afford to live in the cities with livable temperature, to buy potable water, only the most resilient of the poor and middle-class will survive, and their youngsters will be used as soldiers to fight for natural resources, some of their families will enjoy those resources but only enough to breed more soldiers to keep the wars going.

dcolkitt 7y ago
Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence. The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets. Let's be very conservative and assume global GDP per capita grows at 2% per year. In the baseline scenario, the median world citizen would still be 390% richer than the average person today. Applying the worst global warming impact (20% of GDP), the median person would still be 290% richer than the average person today. Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-global-economic-growth-new-study-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...
- jsingleton 7y ago
  Talking about things in terms of GDP glosses over the human suffering that it represents. > a 10% increase in per capita real income is associated with a 1.5% decrease in the crude death rate It seems reasonable to assume that the inverse is also true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

jwr 7y ago

How is this not the #1 story? Why do we even bother with all the other trivia?

jsingleton 7y ago
I think you have perfectly summed up the thoughts of all the school strikers.
taberiand 7y ago
Not only is it not the #1 story, it's not even visible now.
scarejunba 7y ago
Because it's a coordination problem. So you can't actually add marginal value by adding marginal contribution.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
In general or on HN? In general - damned if I know. On HN? We've been having a climate story on a front page pretty much every day for a while now.

carapace 7y ago

Flagging climate stories? WTF?

jsingleton 7y ago
Perhaps a vested interest controls lots of accounts on here and wants to bury stories of this nature (pun not intended)? The comments don't appear to have descended into a flame war so I suspect a bot net has manually flagged it to death. I've seen it a lot on here and it makes me think it's not worth engaging with HN any more.
- carapace 7y ago
  Nah, see? The mods got up Monday morning and put the kibosh on the hijiinks.

dwaltrip 7y ago

This shouldn't be flagged. Is there any way to vouch that a story shouldn't be flagged?

kossTKR 7y ago

The fact that articles from Nature are getting flagged now is beyond dark. Vested interests, desperate denial or plain delusion?

QuitterStrip 7y ago
It seems discussion on climate change is being discouraged on hn. An article from the BBC was also flagged. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054
asaegyn 7y ago
Seems like consistent suppression of climate related news on hackernews increasing noticeably over the past few months.

jsingleton 7y ago

The UN Climate Action Summit 2019 is live online http://webtv.un.org/ http://webtv.un.org/ or https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/ https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/

eloff 7y ago

I've thought a lot about climate change and it's consequences. If we trigger runaway warming through feedback loops involved permafrost and ocean (hydrates) methane - things are going to get really, really bad. This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. Clearly if that happens, we're really in trouble. I don't know how likely that is, or what the trigger point would be. The climate today is not the same as it was 250M years ago. On the other side of the coin, the Earth is uncomfortably cool these last few million years. We have these repeated periods of glaciation. Having Europe, Russia, Canada, and the northern US ground to dust beneath kilometers of ice would be a bit of tragedy too on a similar scale. That it's further away in the future doesn't make it less of a problem - if we're too aggressive solving climate change we could imagine a future where we have to deliberately pump methane into the atmosphere to stave off an ice age. For better or worse we seem to be at no risk of this through our ineptitude in responding to climate change. For people worried about coral reefs dying, it happened less than 10K year ago at the end of the last ice age. Sea level rose 400ft and drowned the world's coral reefs. They bounced back, as you can see today. They will also bounce back from climate change - it will just suck in the meanwhile. There are undoubtedly things we can and will do to make it suck less, like developing heat resistant corals, planting reefs further north/south, etc. For people worried about coastal cities being submerged, relax, you'll be dead by then. Long term, we should be moving our investment to more sustainable areas. But infrastructure doesn't last forever anyway, so I think a lot of that may occur naturally as people just stop developing new infrastructure in low-lying areas. There's no question it will cost us though. If you're really worried about climate change for your descendants, get Canadian citizenship. That's one of the few countries likely to benefit from climate change. So to sum up, climate change is not all bad, just mostly bad, until or unless it runs away on us, and then the doomsayers may be right for a change.

vonmoltke 7y ago
> This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. That's a theory for what happened, but as I understand it the cause of this extinction has not been conclusively proved.

carapace 7y ago

You don't have to wait for anybody. Maybe the most important thing to know is that we can make carbon-neutral alcohol fuel, and, integrated into regenerative agriculture ("Permaculture" et. al.) the economics are totally different than large-scale industrial ethanol production. Think Community-Supported-Agriculture that supplies your gas. Dave "Farmer Dave" Bloom collected all the necessary info into a book (that was banned from public tv at the time!) http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ Get the book, find or start your local fuel co-op! - - - - For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture". Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either. - - - - See also https://www.greenwave.org/our-work https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs? - - - - For more inspiration and projects search "Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert"

Bantros 7y ago

Fucking lol

eledumb 7y ago

Reducing output isn't going to happen, well it won't happen until it's too late. It's like the smoker that gets diagnosed with cancer, and then decides to quite smoking. It's also ludicrous that think that warming will stop and hold at 1.5 or 2.0c adding less won't stop the increase in climate warming, it will just cause the increase to be slower. The other thing that's ludicrous is that we aren't monitoring the earth's output, the warming oceans, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost are now contributing greenhouse gases due to the warming climate, they are now locked into positive feedback loops. Which means every cycle the changes get a little bit bigger as the cycles feed themselves. Unless we can start to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere these feedback loops are just going to keep running.

joshuaheard 7y ago

It looks like if you take China and India out of the equation, the numbers are trending down.

riffraff 7y ago
If you take China and India out of the equation you are removing a lot of goods which are used in the rest of the world, though.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Including a big fraction (most, I think) of solar capacity installed around the world.
- jajag 7y ago
  This is a whole part of the problem. Globalisation and the offshoring of manufacturing to the east has meant a corresponding offset of emissions from the Europe and the US to China and other places. We in the West have to take some responsibility for this. You can argue that globalisation does have a noble goal - i.e. to reduce global inequality by raising the standard of living of all to that of the most well-off nations - but the now obvious trends of climate change, global heating and emissions, are showing this to be a dangerous and unobtainable goal. It seems to me that we have to start looking at reductions of living standards in the West (to maybe what we had 30-40 years ago) with corresponding reductions in global trade. I have little confidence that we can actually achieve this in an organized and equitable manner.

nostromo 7y ago

Actually a lot of progress has been made, except in China, which has increased emissions to the point of reversing all other progress globally. By comparison, US carbon has been going down since 2007, despite a growing population and economy. Per capita it's been declining for over four decades. China now emits more than the US and EU combined, despite having much, much less economic output.

uoaei 7y ago
Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the destination country, not the production country. China supplies the world a lot of goods. It doesn't seem appropriate to put the onus on China when the end result of that production run brings all that stuff over to another country.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the destination country, not the production country. Has anybody studied this yet? This point comes up every time this issue is discussed, but I don't remember ever seeing any effort into quantifying what the situation looks like from this perspective.
scarejunba 7y ago
Unavoidable. They're playing catch up. It seems fairly obvious to me that we should say "Total emissions by some date (say 2080) should equal some value (say X) and we calculate from the Industrial Age to that date and apportion according to what percentage of the Earth you own". The West polluted from 1900 to 2020 and reaped the rewards. The cutbacks The West must make must be proportional. Otherwise it's like inheriting all your wealth from a thief and then making thievery a blanket crime.

Mikeb85 7y ago

So who wants to volunteer to have their living conditions drastically reduced? The west likes to blame China and India, places we've outsourced manufacturing and work to and yet somehow they still produce far less CO2 per capita. We shame people into reducing their individual emissions while ignoring the fact that industry produces most of the emissions. The fact is, no country is going to take drastic measures. We don't know exactly what's going to happen when the world warms 3 degrees (we have ideas, but the world has been both warmer and colder in the past, and somehow life survived). We do however know what would happen if we suddenly stunted economic progress tomorrow (nothing good).

throwaway5752 7y ago
I will. I think you are missing quite a bit of research on what a 3 deg C/6 deg F warmer world looks like. It will stunt economic growth a lot more than voluntary measures. edit: "The west likes to blame China and India, places we've outsourced manufacturing and work to and yet somehow they still produce far less CO2 per capita. We shame people into reducing their individual emissions while ignoring the fact that industry produces most of the emissions." do you see how you are contradicting yourself here saying that placed we've outsource industry to have lower per capita CO2 emissions. Can you clarify that?
about_help 7y ago
This argument is tired. We can maintain 1st world living conditions while drastically reducing emissions. Throw away consumerism is literally a toxic force on the planet, but the wealthy do not want to disrupt their income streams and "gamble" their fortunes on reinvestment or environmental rehabilitation. Your argument is akin to "why don't you donate all your money" when someone says the rich should be taxed more heavily.
r00fus 7y ago
Sounds like you're always the first one to reply to anything climate related with some false dichotomy. We can make changes without adjusting living conditions drastically - moving to EVs, removing fossil fuel subsidies, pushing solar over coal/gas. In fact, we might improve our living conditions by reducing our addition to oil, as long as it's managed and not cold-turkey.

neves 7y ago

USA and Canada have more than the double of emissions per capita than China. While these countries doesn't take the responsibility for climate change, nothing will change.

hollerith 7y ago
The US and Canada should definitely take more responsibility for climate change, but I trust emissions numbers coming out of China about as much as I trusted economic numbers coming out of the Soviet Union.
dade_ 7y ago
There should also be a factor for land mass when considering "fairness", but reality is that the tar sands are the cause of our growing ghg emmissions. Even the industry's propaganda site claims it is single handedly responsible for 10% of Canada's emmisions: https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-topics/ghg-emissions https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-topics/ghg-emissio... I can only imagine how much money they spend trying to rebrand tarsands as oilsands...