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US emissions fell 2.1% in 2019
- pcarolan 7y agoHow much of this is due to the fact that we're exporting pollution in the form of plant outsourcing to countries willing to absorb those externalities (China)?
- spectramax 7y agoWhat do you mean by "exporting pollution in the form of plant outsourcing"?
- matthewaveryusa 7y agoseems pretty clear to me: you used to manufacture X in the US, now you import X from the US. The pollution that X used to generate in the US is off the US's emissions sheet.
- spectramax 7y agoThe entire world has made China its manufacturing hub. I advise you to go to Germany and walk into a hardware store, just inventory the number of items that are made in China. Or Australia, Switzerland, Canada, pick your favorite nation. Furthermore, US has been importing X for over 20 years. It is not like US started importing last year. This argument makes no sense. See the top comment - the reason is decrease in Coal plants.
- ben_w 7y ago“Other people are also outsourcing emissions” is an irrelevant point, especially in an article about how the U.S. emissions have fallen in the last year and when the conversation is about why. That the U.S. started 20 (ish) years ago is a pertinent point, especially as the article points out that the preceding year saw U.S. emissions increase.
- jessaustin 7y agoAlso this increases shipping requirements. Many people say that global shipping also contributes to global warming.
- cpitman 7y agoI assume he means exporting manufacturing and other "dirty" industries. IE, we import rare earth based products from China because they can mine them so cheaply, at least partially because they don't have the same concern for environmental impact of the mining.
- yepthatsreality 7y agoMy guess is the OC is alluding to the large amount of manufacturing that happens in China. If that were to occur in the US then the pollution would happen here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- maxnoe 7y agoIf you buy goods instead of producing them, the emissions are shifted largely to the producing country. It s therefore important to look at the footprint of imported and exported goods.
- mc32 7y agoSounds like they are tacitly advocating repatriating manufacturing to cleaner energy countries and putting pollution tariffs on products based on how dirty or clean they were manufactured...
- jxf 7y agoYou want to build a widget in a factory. The factory consumes 1 MW of power to operate and emits 5 kg per hour of pollutants into the air as a byproduct of widget production. If the work the factory does is outsourced to China, the widgets don't necessarily cost less energy or emissions to produce. So you've just shifted emissions from one country to another — it's an accounting trick, not a genuine reduction.
- jplayer01 7y agoI've seen this argument before but I'm not sure it's the case (anymore). Example: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2. I've also seen other similar conclusions elsewhere. It's worth looking into.
- therealdrag0 7y agoI was skeptical of Andrew McAfee' More from Less (Listened to him on EconTalk) because of his data didn't take into account outsourcing production. So thanks for this resource; will read later.
- gumby 7y agoI assume you mean "plant" as in manufactory. It's a good question in general though I don't believe it was a major factor in 2019 specifically. That ship sailed decades ago. If you mean "plant" as in Kingdom plantae it goes the other way as US exports have become increasingly polar (either primary extractive outputs like mining and agriculture or ultra high tech like super-precision bearings and certain software)
- melling 7y ago“ This was due to a decrease in coal plants, which resulted in an emissions drop of 190 million metric tons” Yep, coal is one of the biggest problems. https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-climate-change/ https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...
- stazz1 7y agoTrading breathing air for one-time-use energy is absurd
- ksdale 7y agoI agree that it doesn't make sense at all for the US to trade breathing air for one time energy use, but in the abstract, trading breathing air for cheap energy in order to lift people out of poverty is far from absurd, it's an actual, difficult trade off that should be thought about carefully. A lot of people still live in homes constantly filled with wood smoke, for whom an electric coal-powered cooking stove would drastically improve their air quality. Naturally coal is still terrible for the environment, but ours is a position of great privilege, to have clean air feel so much more important than the source of our energy.
- ip26 7y agoTo your point, even a coal-burning cooking stove is better than a wood-burning cooking stove. To wit, some months of the year the very worst air quality in the world is in Coyhaique, Chile due to their geography & use of green wood for heating & cooking. https://undark.org/2018/12/05/air-pollution-chile/ https://undark.org/2018/12/05/air-pollution-chile/
- aalleavitch 7y agoWe can't ignore the opportunity costs. Every cent of money and effort we put towards digging fossil fuels out of the ground is money and effort we don't spend towards developing new and better sources of renewable energy. Even if the opportunity for short-term revenue is better for the former, the latter is going to secure cheap, sustainable, long-term energy independence for all of us. If we want to lift people out of energy poverty, we want to do so permanently, not in a way that leaves them back in poverty again after all our sources run out.
- rwem 7y agoBecause we’re all idiots and waited too long, we need to cut emissions by 15% annually, not 2%. 2% does not even offset the increase in US emissions in 2018. 2% is a disaster.
- stazz1 7y agochaos continues into chaos we must water the seeds of order
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoWe don’t need to do anything. We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research. If anything I expect us to increase in CO2 while we retrofit buildings with better technology, build clean power generation and grid tech, and continue in our research. There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it’s not the United States.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago> We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research. That's like trying to sell someone a $10 carrot by saying it's 50% off, or an over-weight person thinking it's okay that they're eating a bag of chips because they went to the gym.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ta999999171 7y agoIt's more like an overweight person looking around at the 70% of morbidly obese people in the population, and saying "Meh, few chips won't hurt". They're wrong...but not nearly as wrong as everyone else.
- oblio 7y agoThe world population is 7.8 billion people. The US population is ~330 million people. So the US has ~4% of the world population. The US pollution being "only" about 15% of the world pollution wouldn't be something I'd pat myself on the back, if I'd be American ;-)
- trekrich 7y agoyea but trump! I thought he wanted to keep coal.
- brink 7y agoI don't think Trump is pro-coal or anti-coal more than he is just pro-economy and pro-capitalism and judged the economy as pro-coal. The economy is a voice of the people and thankfully happened to move towards a more eco-friendly solution to energy.
- giarc 7y agoHe's definitely pro-coal, the energy industry isn't pro-coal or anti-coal, they are pro-profits. Coal just isn't cost effective anymore so industry is building out natural gas instead of coal.
- wyldfire 7y ago> I don't think Trump is pro-coal or anti-coal This is a very peculiar stance to take. Clearly he says that he supports coal [1]. Trump's EPA has "Affordable Clean Energy Rule" [2] to revert Obama's EPA's Clean Power Plan. Economics of coal alternatives get in the way [3] [4]. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/GettyImages-826173358.jpg https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/GettyIm... [2] https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/affordable-clean-energy-rule https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/afforda... [3] https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/ https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/ [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-trump-country-a-group-of-coal-miners-rebel-over-lost-jobs-missed-paychecks/2019/08/31/52ee4fbc-cb2e-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-trump-country-a-g...
- bagacrap 7y agoIsn't he subsidizing coal now? How is that pro capitalism? He's not even pro-economy if you take a long term view and believe climate change is going to cost trillions to deal with.
- danans 7y ago
- option 7y agowe need more Nuclear power to drop emissions faster and by bigger % while allowing energy production and consumption to increase at the same time
- acidburnNSA 7y agoTo qualify your statement I'll claim that nuclear is the only low-carbon energy source we know that can run 24/7 in a wide variety of locations. Hydro can run all night too, but is geographically limited. This matters because filling in gaps of intermittency requires the production and maintenance of "nonproductive" equipment (like batteries) which takes energy to make, install, maintain, recycle at a scale that may challenge the energy return on investment in many renewable situations.
- TheCoreh 7y agoOn the scale of a large solar power plant, pumped water storage has superior durability and much easier maintainability than batteries. Besides, the water that's pumped up hill can actually be "productive", e.g. suppling water to a city or to farms
- acidburnNSA 7y agoYes, but pumped storage requires a certain geography, takes up vast amounts of land, and may cause serious biogenic methane emissions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/
- oceanplexian 7y agoHydro also destroys ecosystems since it requires damming rivers and creating a reservoir. It's also quite risky, since when poorly maintained a structural collapse can kill thousands of people downstream. This has happened in China and California came really close to creating a man-made disaster only a few years ago.
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- acidburnNSA 7y agoThis is largely because we are replacing coal plants with fracked natural gas plants, which we are doing because fracked gas is cheap and plentiful. Fracked gas is way better from an air pollution point of view and a little better from a direct carbon emission point of view. But when you consider the methane leaks from wellheads and pipelines and facilities it is roughly as bad as coal for climate. This is overall not a good story for climate as we lock in gas plants for decades. Renewables and nuclear deployments did not factor in much to this decrease.
- misiti3780 7y agoYep, in 2017 the US became the largest exporter of crude oil, surpassing Saudi Arabia because of fracking. American natural gas production, which had been essentially flat since the mid-1970s, jumped by nearly 43 percent between 2007 and 2017.
- dcolkitt 7y ago> But when you consider the methane leaks from wellheads and pipelines and facilities it is roughly as bad as coal for climate. This makes intuitive sense. But do you have a source for how that calculation was determined. My understanding is that the impact of methane viz-a-viz carbon is highly sensitive to the time frame that you're considering. Methane is highly potent in terms of warning but quickly breaks down in the atmosphere.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoQuickly is a relative term. Methane won't exist for millennia like CO2, but it will contribute to positive feedback loops in the coming decades in the climate that lead to further warming. Ideally, gas should be deployed as a transitional and backup energy source; let's use it to kill coal, then let's use it as flexible generation once renewables are much higher %. This is assuming batteries and other storage don't ramp quickly enough.
- uncoder0 7y agoThe upside of methane is that it's short lived in the atmosphere with a half life in the atmosphere of ~7 years. At the end of the day we do need more nuclear it's the best solution and the newest generation of reactors can consume the 'waste' from our older generation plants, it's a win/win.
- darksaints 7y agoI agree with the view that we'll see a rapid change when new renewables are cheaper than continued operation of existing fossil fuel plants. However, where is that threshold? We're seeing solar and wind with LCoE as low as $0.03/kWh. How much further do we have to go?
- beat 7y agoI think we're already seeing about as rapid a change as available capital can support. Transition has a great deal of up-front cost, even if it's a money-saver in the long run.
- ben_w 7y agoI don’t think we need to get cheaper, rather that we need to continue to scale up production of PV/wind and batteries. Even with current cost of batteries we can eliminate 100% of coal while saving money; doing so will reduce energy costs enough to eliminate fuel oil, which in turn will reduce the cost enough to eliminate gas.
- darksaints 7y agoBatteries, while very efficient, have some pretty harsh scaling problems, and are very expensive for the tail end of availability needs. There are plenty of energy storage options that are comparably inefficient but scale much easier (such as hydrogen storage or thermal storage), but lower energy production costs can mitigate the expense of inefficiency.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Panino 7y agoThis article is very short but (some) early commenters appear not to have read it, and most subthreads at this moment started from them. Here are some of the important points from the article: > This was due to a decrease in coal plants > Further, renewables were up 6% in 2019 > Emissions rose from buildings [2.2%], industry [0.6%], and other parts of the economy I'm supposed to take delivery of solar panels at my house today. It shouldn't be long before they're operational. I'm so excited! To people in general, what improvements are you making (not your country, but you personally)? Not something you've always done - what's your latest new eco-project, big or small?
- gwbas1c 7y agoI heat with heat pumps instead of natural gas. (BTW: Not sure if you did the numbers, but with my solar system, electricity is so darn cheap that running a heat pump (air) is cheaper than running a natural gas furnace. If my house was smaller.) I also put in a wood stove and light the fire when it's extremely cold and I'm home for awhile. Wood is carbon neutral. (The carbon released is carbon that the tree captured while it was alive.) (Although some people like to point out that burning wood releases particulates and other nasty pollutants.)
- Cytobit 7y agoI'm not sure how burning wood is carbon neutral. Trees, other plants, etc. will sequester carbon from the atmosphere at the same rate regardless of the source. All that matters is how much gets into the atmosphere.
- gwbas1c 7y agoBecause the trees sucked the carbon out of the air to make their wood as they grew, and if the trees are left to decay naturally, the carbon returns to the air. It's just the basic carbon cycle: plants remove carbon from the air as they grow, and return it as they decay, (or burn in a natural fire.)
- ph0rque 7y ago
- exabrial 7y agoThis is a nice win, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to China's increase and they already own 1/3 of total emissions. Source: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
- jes5199 7y agoChina is very close to the tipping point where it stops making economic sense to burn coal. They already are running their coal infrastructure at much lower load
- spikels 7y agoThe coal power situation in China is bizarre. You are correct that many coal plants are currently operating well below capacity. However China continues to build massive amounts of new coal power plants. Appears their planning efforts have gone haywire. https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...
- jes5199 7y agoI agree that it's weird. Maybe it's similar to US policies to prop up coal rather than deal with retraining workers? There's reports that they just implemented a coal pricing reform: https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/11759-New-pricing-could-spell-trouble-for-China-s-coal-sector- https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/11759-N...
- spikels 7y agoInteresting article that goes into some of the details of China’s energy price regulation and planning. Apparently they had been fixing both input and output prices. I can see how this could easily produce this “weird” situation: mismatches between perceived and actual demand could easily develop and expected coal generation project risk and profitability could be an illusion. Even these modest reforms could drastically change things. Perhaps they will realize that the projects don’t make sense either financially or environmentally. More likely overbuilding will continue and this will just become yet another unbalanced sector of the Chinese economy.
- asdf333 7y agogreat!!! lets keep it up!!!
- C14L 7y agoCongrats. But its still a long way to go to even approach OECD average: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- nsriv 7y agoNever thought I'd see natural gas shills on HN.
- shard972 7y agoThe fact we have people running around calling people "gas shills" as if the gas lobby of all industries is paying people to infiltrate hacker news says a lot about the current state of discourse around climate change.
- jes5199 7y agoI wonder if 2020 is the year that global emissions start to fall. In some sense, that's too little too late, but I still think it would be a victory. It's really up to China, who was mostly recently estimated to peak in 2022, but who knows really
- WizardAustralis 7y agoWill be interesting to see, the last time there was a decline was during the 2008 GFC. As we continue moving to decouple GDP from CO2 emissions eventually we can have a drop without an economic disaster to do it.
- joeblow21 7y agoThis is what winning looks like.
- newguy1234 7y agoEmissions are dropping but what about carbon sinks? Are we doing anything to plant more trees?
- Mangalor 7y agoWe are making some progress. Here's a couple projects to check out: https://www.fastcompany.com/90329982/these-tree-planting-drones-are-firing-seed-missiles-to-restore-the-worlds-forests https://www.fastcompany.com/90329982/these-tree-planting-dro... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-capture-backed-by-bill-gates-oil-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-captu...
- newguy1234 7y agoWhat about carbon sinks, are we planting more trees?
- chiefalchemist 7y agoIf net importing was up then it means we've "outsourced" our polluting. Also, the type of emissions matters, with some pollutants being more greenhouse-y than others.
- dang 7y agoUrl changed from https://electrek.co/2020/01/08/us-emissions-drop-2019/ https://electrek.co/2020/01/08/us-emissions-drop-2019/, which points to this.
- ryanmercer 7y agoI wonder how much of that is a result of the fairly mild fall/winter we've had so far.
- m0zg 7y agoIt's as if the Paris Climate Accord was a bullshit piece of paper that didn't really do anything and cost the US money that could be better deployed right here in the US. The only way to address emissions is by making alternatives not only economically viable, but economically _advantageous_. I think we're at the point in the curve where you won't really even need carbon taxes or additional regulation for the "greener" alternatives to hockey stick. As the prices drop it eventually won't make any sense to use anything else. I'd like nuclear to be a prominent part of this solution in the interest of reducing CO2 emissions faster though.
- CivBase 7y agoIt surprises me that emissions from the transportation industry seem to be increasing despite mainstreaming of EVs. I understand EVs are not a prefect solution because they just pass the emissions to the power plants, but considering the documented improvements in our power infrastructure, I thought that would have at least a slight knock-on effect for transportation. I figure the rate should at least be decreasing, even if it's very slow. Is it just too soon to see the impact of EVs? Is it related the rise in delivered goods? Is there just more travel within the US in general?
- perfunctory 7y agoFWIW, "Surging SUV demand is canceling out the environmental benefit from electric cars" https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/surging-suv-demand-is-canceling-out-the-environmental-benefit-from-electric-cars.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/surging-suv-demand-is-cancel...
- CivBase 7y agoI reckon that most of the demand for SUVs is driven by interior space, carying capacity, and 4WD. I bet there's opportunity in the market for an affordable EV that offers those features. The Model X is cool, but it isn't "affordable" like the Model 3.
- therealdrag0 7y agoKia Niro EV seems pretty legit to cover those factors. Also Rav4 and Subaru Crosstrek hybrids. Ford Escape and Rav4 PHEV is coming this year. (Rav4 Prime looks dope) Another aspect of SUVs is just the feeling of sitting "high", it's hard to let go of after you've tasted it. And personally, I think sedans are harder on my back after long drives. Also I'd speculate that SUVs kinda replace the mini-vans of previous generations since now we're having less kids (and maybe they're being less social?).
- perfunctory 7y ago> I reckon that most of the demand for SUVs is driven by interior space, carying capacity, and 4WD I believe it's driven by obnoxiously aggressive marketing.
- bamboozled 7y agoIt’s a a start, it’s excellent news. I wonder if the people of America can significantly beat this figure in 2020?
- perfunctory 7y agoI guess this can be considered excellent news by current standards. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king after all. According to the latest UN emissions gap report we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% every year starting now to meet Paris agreement. And given US position in the world, it should probably do more than global average.
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoHow is China doing?