13 ms·

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

roenxi 6y ago
Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
- cher88 6y ago
  Isn't this the more pertinent graph? https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND~CHN~NGA~ETH https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly. Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you. Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you. Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country-the-decline-of-the-number-of-children-per-woman-since-1950 https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It's declining in Africa also. https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-africa/ https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out. Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
    - tomtomtom777 6y ago
      > Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution. Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.
      - belorn 6y ago
        Splitting a country is not going to lower the pollution, but equally so does a high populations density not decrease pollution.
    - op03 6y ago
      >> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy "We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people? As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we". All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent. Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont. Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.
      - Mahn 6y ago
        "We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly more energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.
      - jrs235 6y ago
        Hmmm. Could it be our stick houses instead of brick and designs that rely on AC for summer cooling?
      - refurb 6y ago
        Take a look at Canada, it's even higher. That should provides clues.
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      > If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly. (This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    From the perspective of actually fixing the problem (which takes capital investment), the most pertinent graph would be per unit of GDP. It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.
  - belorn 6y ago
    Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from. If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.
    - blackoil 6y ago
      As my logical view, the one who is emitting and can afford to reduce, should work on it.
    - tzs 6y ago
      > Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from. So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?
      - belorn 6y ago
        Splitting of countries has as much improvement as getting higher population density. A 5 person household does not have less pollution than 4 person household just because they got one person more to share the blame. Similar two countries combined do as much pollution as if they were separated, because physics does not care about borders. If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there. If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.
- paganel 6y ago
  And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
  - corty 6y ago
    The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.
    - perfunctory 6y ago
      I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage. This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
      - hengheng 6y ago
        Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.
      - ptr 6y ago
        If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?
        wwright 6y ago
        Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
- originalvichy 6y ago
  I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up. My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).
  - noworriesnate 6y ago
    If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.
    - he0001 6y ago
      Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?
      - noworriesnate 6y ago
        No, because companies that want to employ Americans can't compete with companies that want to employ Chinese, because it costs less to employ Chinese. In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
        he0001 6y ago
        Tariffs have been good for China. In fact their economy is booming. Polluting your own soil is never a good thing and spills over on other aspects of society makes it more expensive.
- jwr 6y ago
  This is a very harmful, and yet depressingly common answer. "But look at [...finger-pointing here...]" — which "justifies" doing nothing. So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.
- neya 6y ago
  > The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries. I just can't fucking believe what I just read.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Don’t apply emotions to science. Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions. Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      > Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions. Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.
      - pcr0 6y ago
        I assume consumption and population growth have declined due to COVID19, which also greatly reduce emissions. Even after it ends, it will take years before we return to pre-pandemic levels.
        UncleMeat 6y ago
        But slowing growth isn't enough. It needs to drop dramatically and permanently.
  - OGWhales 6y ago
    Right? Surely it is the responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis. Putting the blame on developing nations for daring to live the same way we do is... pretty ridiculous.
- OGWhales 6y ago
  >The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?
- gnramires 6y ago
  If the US, brimming with wealth, technologically advanced and educated can't commit to fighting climate change, what will the poorest developing countries decide? They would need to take the burden themselves and falling behind economically (something China in particular would strongly resist). A few defectors can ruin the entire plan because of economic pressure. I think we should be nearing an accord with greater control anyway -- defectors will need to suffer harsh economic sanctions greater than what they'd spend on the accord anyway. I expect this to happen within a few years.
tootie 6y ago
It was barely debated. We can't even get half the country to care about a disaster that's unfolding in their faces.
- paulgb 6y ago
  The frustrating thing about the handling of COVID is watching the climate change story play out at lightning speed. Deny the problem exists, politicize the science, eventually admit the problem but say there's nothing we can do about it, etc.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      There's no playbook here. It may look like there is, because we keep seeing the same thing happening, but it's not coordination - it's the outcome of everyone caring primarily about their own personal interests over those of everyone else. We've built an economy and a culture that demands this kind of selfishness. COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business processes, the pandemic happened in a flash. And yet every country mismanaged the reaction in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reason. This wasn't coordinated, it's the default way we fail to solve global problems.
      - tootie 6y ago
        I think COVID is different. There have been coordinate disinformation campaigns emanating from vested parties in the past. Tobacco and fossil fuel companies actively invest in tamping down regulation and sponsoring fake science to support their goals. There is no pro-COVID lobby in any corner of the world who wants people to die to protect their profits. Trump has made some ham-fisted attempts to pretend one exists, but in general companies big and small are treating it as very real and very dangerous to their bottom lines. Small businesses and brick and mortars are pushing to relax restrictions with the express intent of trading health for wealth. I see a really disturbing trend among American Conservatives to just decide there's nothing to be done about the pandemic and whoever dies, dies.
eznzt 6y ago
The main fear I have during this election is that Biden wins, he picks up where Obama left waging wars, and once again they flood Europe with "refugees".
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Replacement migration has been handled about as poorly as possible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  You realize Obama didn’t start any wars and spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nichos 6y ago
    What about Syria? Obama has been at war longer than any president in the history of the country.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      The Syrian civil war (if that's what you're referring to) is a result of the Arab Spring that started in 2010 in reaction to low standards of living in Tunisia, which spread to amongst others Syria. That's the wiki summary anyway, which doesn't directly implicate the US or any particular president. That said, general unrest in the middle-east can be attributed to meddling from the US that has been going on for decades, from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the US funding the Afghans during the Soviet/Afghan war, to the first and second gulf war, the Saudis, etc. While I don't like Obama's policy when it came to the conflicts down there, he inherited it from decades of policy.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs. Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them. Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward. UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.
- mola 6y ago
  You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    Yep. I think it's reasonable to think that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without the nearly half a billion dollars it was loaned by the federal government in 2010. https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Capitalism and enterpreneurship is how we got here in the first place. Elon and renewables are only becoming a thing because of economic incentives from governments - positive incentives in the form of subsidies on e.g. new EVs, solar panels, etc, and negative incentives in the form of carbon taxes. Take those away and the "green" companies would have NO incentive to push their work. They'd be working with people wanting to do better first and foremost, and then they would - ironically - be competing with petrol and energy companies, who also have "green" all over their marketing. Renewables and EVs could not compete without government incentives.
koheripbal 6y ago
The biggest issue with the Paris Accords is that China did not commit to begin any restrictions until 2030. ...and since they are both the world's largest CO2 emitter and world's fastest growing CO2 emitter, the Accords became a corporate strategy to just move more manufacturing to China (and other non-limited countries). Frankly, I think the Paris Accords does more harm than good by giving anyone the notion that we were solving the problem. The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.
- laurent92 6y ago
  It is also based on the idea that any human deserves the same emissions. Of course, at first level, it is legitimate. However, a country which doesn’t want to pollute should rather choose to keep their population low, through various incentives including cost of life. It would set them back on the economic power, but that may be a choice: Better lifestyle for fewer people. In the current system, however, a country who keeps their population low will have small allowances; It clearly incentives overpopulating its land. This inverse-incentive effect may provoke countries into doing nothing against evergrowing population, keeping cost of life too affordable, and thus, ensuring that the next generation will be overpopulated, and thus, extenuating the land.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Unfortunately, with open (or even just somehow permeable) borders, any noticeable delta in lifestyle would just be gobbled up by slow population displacement from shamelessly breeding places. There at no panacea solutions. I envy those born a decade earlier and pity those born a decade later.
- mola 6y ago
  You cannot hinder developing countries from the comfort of living in a develop country. The fact that China agreed to a year is amazing. If the US would have kept part of that deal then maybe we would've seen improvements. But now that the US basically proven to be untrustworthy, even towards allies, these kind of deals are just undoable anymore. This will end in tears
mkoubaa 6y ago
Oh it certainly can get worse
umanwizard 6y ago
What does the election have to do with it? As far as I know, neither major candidate has a realistic plan for climate action.
sampo 6y ago
USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%. Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Right that makes sense, also https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
  Isn't it bunk to apply extrapolation to two countries that start from a different per capita base? Germany is significantly lower in per capita emissions so their reduction is (I'm assuming) a lot harder to achieve. It's like comparing fat loss between someone who starts overweight vs someone who is starting neutral bmi. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=~USA#per-capita-how-much-co2-does-the-average-person-emit https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... and add Germany. Happy to hear why I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in stats or emissions.
- tw04 6y ago
  >USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%. Which is primarily due to Obama era regulations that Trump has done everything he can to roll back. Had the price of gas not skyrocketed and the mortgage crisis not hit, we would've had almost no improvements from 2000-2008. If you look at the data available from 2016-2018 we went BACKWARDS. You can't extrapolate the data from Obama's regulations that have rolled back and say: look it'll take care of itself.
macspoofing 6y ago
>4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (or faster) than Europe. That trend will continue. So what will Paris actually do in practical terms? The problem is that after transitioning away from coal, there isn't a clear answer about the next step. Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload ... not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Per_Capita_CO2_by_Region.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Total_CO2_by_Region.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
- FerretFred 6y ago
  >coal to natural gas Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
  - est31 6y ago
    CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e.png https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e...
    - sampo 6y ago
      > CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. Unfortunately there are methane leaks in the systems, and it is quite possible that when accounting for the methane releases, natural gas has equally bad climate effect (emissions of CO2 and CH4 combined) as coal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ycombonator 6y ago
Has China signed on to this if so, have they shown verifiable reductions?
victor106 6y ago
Japan is racing to build coal plants while US is reducing https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/clim...
hourislate 6y ago
4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world Were you referring to China? They are still building coal plants at a record pace.
robomartin 6y ago
This is part of the fallacy in this mess that climate change has become. If the US evaporated from the planet, nothing would change. In fact, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise. Humanity cannot solve this problem by subtraction. If ALL of humanity left the planet, it would take 100,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2. That means we can’t solve it by eliminating fossil fuels, cars, trucks, planes, etc. We can’t solve it with solar panels. And we sure as heck know the Paris accord can’t solve it either. It is astounding to me to see see how we continue to talk about this problem from the perspective of a premise that is completely false. Source: 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Which European country are you in?
spaetzleesser 6y ago
As a European living in the US I think it’s time for Europe to stop looking at the US and start leading. If you are worried about climate change, there is plenty of stuff that can be done in Europe without the US. Europe could also take a strong lead in developing green technologies. Stop worrying about the US and stand on your own feet!
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Europe already does a lot more. 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...

roenxi 6y ago

Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN

cher88 6y ago
Isn't this the more pertinent graph? https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND~CHN~NGA~ETH https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
- roenxi 6y ago
  Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly. Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you. Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you. Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country-the-decline-of-the-number-of-children-per-woman-since-1950 https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...
        pfdietz 6y ago
        It's declining in Africa also. https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-africa/ https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out. Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
  - tomtomtom777 6y ago
    > Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution. Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.
    - belorn 6y ago
      Splitting a country is not going to lower the pollution, but equally so does a high populations density not decrease pollution.
  - op03 6y ago
    >> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy "We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people? As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we". All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent. Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont. Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.
    - Mahn 6y ago
      "We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly more energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.
    - jrs235 6y ago
      Hmmm. Could it be our stick houses instead of brick and designs that rely on AC for summer cooling?
    - refurb 6y ago
      Take a look at Canada, it's even higher. That should provides clues.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly. (This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)
- koheripbal 6y ago
  From the perspective of actually fixing the problem (which takes capital investment), the most pertinent graph would be per unit of GDP. It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.
- belorn 6y ago
  Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from. If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    As my logical view, the one who is emitting and can afford to reduce, should work on it.
  - tzs 6y ago
    > Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from. So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?
    - belorn 6y ago
      Splitting of countries has as much improvement as getting higher population density. A 5 person household does not have less pollution than 4 person household just because they got one person more to share the blame. Similar two countries combined do as much pollution as if they were separated, because physics does not care about borders. If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there. If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.
paganel 6y ago
And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
- corty 6y ago
  The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.
  - perfunctory 6y ago
    I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage. This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
    - hengheng 6y ago
      Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.
    - ptr 6y ago
      If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?
      - wwright 6y ago
        Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
originalvichy 6y ago
I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up. My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).
- noworriesnate 6y ago
  If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.
  - he0001 6y ago
    Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?
    - noworriesnate 6y ago
      No, because companies that want to employ Americans can't compete with companies that want to employ Chinese, because it costs less to employ Chinese. In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
      - he0001 6y ago
        Tariffs have been good for China. In fact their economy is booming. Polluting your own soil is never a good thing and spills over on other aspects of society makes it more expensive.
jwr 6y ago
This is a very harmful, and yet depressingly common answer. "But look at [...finger-pointing here...]" — which "justifies" doing nothing. So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.
neya 6y ago
> The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries. I just can't fucking believe what I just read.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Don’t apply emotions to science. Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions. Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    > Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions. Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.
    - pcr0 6y ago
      I assume consumption and population growth have declined due to COVID19, which also greatly reduce emissions. Even after it ends, it will take years before we return to pre-pandemic levels.
      - UncleMeat 6y ago
        But slowing growth isn't enough. It needs to drop dramatically and permanently.
- OGWhales 6y ago
  Right? Surely it is the responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis. Putting the blame on developing nations for daring to live the same way we do is... pretty ridiculous.
OGWhales 6y ago
>The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?
gnramires 6y ago
If the US, brimming with wealth, technologically advanced and educated can't commit to fighting climate change, what will the poorest developing countries decide? They would need to take the burden themselves and falling behind economically (something China in particular would strongly resist). A few defectors can ruin the entire plan because of economic pressure. I think we should be nearing an accord with greater control anyway -- defectors will need to suffer harsh economic sanctions greater than what they'd spend on the accord anyway. I expect this to happen within a few years.

tootie 6y ago

It was barely debated. We can't even get half the country to care about a disaster that's unfolding in their faces.

paulgb 6y ago
The frustrating thing about the handling of COVID is watching the climate change story play out at lightning speed. Deny the problem exists, politicize the science, eventually admit the problem but say there's nothing we can do about it, etc.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    There's no playbook here. It may look like there is, because we keep seeing the same thing happening, but it's not coordination - it's the outcome of everyone caring primarily about their own personal interests over those of everyone else. We've built an economy and a culture that demands this kind of selfishness. COVID-19 gives solid evidence that there is no playbook involved: in terms of political and business processes, the pandemic happened in a flash. And yet every country mismanaged the reaction in roughly the same way, for roughly the same reason. This wasn't coordinated, it's the default way we fail to solve global problems.
    - tootie 6y ago
      I think COVID is different. There have been coordinate disinformation campaigns emanating from vested parties in the past. Tobacco and fossil fuel companies actively invest in tamping down regulation and sponsoring fake science to support their goals. There is no pro-COVID lobby in any corner of the world who wants people to die to protect their profits. Trump has made some ham-fisted attempts to pretend one exists, but in general companies big and small are treating it as very real and very dangerous to their bottom lines. Small businesses and brick and mortars are pushing to relax restrictions with the express intent of trading health for wealth. I see a really disturbing trend among American Conservatives to just decide there's nothing to be done about the pandemic and whoever dies, dies.

eznzt 6y ago

The main fear I have during this election is that Biden wins, he picks up where Obama left waging wars, and once again they flood Europe with "refugees".

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Replacement migration has been handled about as poorly as possible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
coffeefirst 6y ago
You realize Obama didn’t start any wars and spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nichos 6y ago
  What about Syria? Obama has been at war longer than any president in the history of the country.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    The Syrian civil war (if that's what you're referring to) is a result of the Arab Spring that started in 2010 in reaction to low standards of living in Tunisia, which spread to amongst others Syria. That's the wiki summary anyway, which doesn't directly implicate the US or any particular president. That said, general unrest in the middle-east can be attributed to meddling from the US that has been going on for decades, from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the US funding the Afghans during the Soviet/Afghan war, to the first and second gulf war, the Saudis, etc. While I don't like Obama's policy when it came to the conflicts down there, he inherited it from decades of policy.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs. Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them. Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward. UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.

mola 6y ago
You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Yep. I think it's reasonable to think that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without the nearly half a billion dollars it was loaned by the federal government in 2010. https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Capitalism and enterpreneurship is how we got here in the first place. Elon and renewables are only becoming a thing because of economic incentives from governments - positive incentives in the form of subsidies on e.g. new EVs, solar panels, etc, and negative incentives in the form of carbon taxes. Take those away and the "green" companies would have NO incentive to push their work. They'd be working with people wanting to do better first and foremost, and then they would - ironically - be competing with petrol and energy companies, who also have "green" all over their marketing. Renewables and EVs could not compete without government incentives.

koheripbal 6y ago

The biggest issue with the Paris Accords is that China did not commit to begin any restrictions until 2030. ...and since they are both the world's largest CO2 emitter and world's fastest growing CO2 emitter, the Accords became a corporate strategy to just move more manufacturing to China (and other non-limited countries). Frankly, I think the Paris Accords does more harm than good by giving anyone the notion that we were solving the problem. The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.

laurent92 6y ago
It is also based on the idea that any human deserves the same emissions. Of course, at first level, it is legitimate. However, a country which doesn’t want to pollute should rather choose to keep their population low, through various incentives including cost of life. It would set them back on the economic power, but that may be a choice: Better lifestyle for fewer people. In the current system, however, a country who keeps their population low will have small allowances; It clearly incentives overpopulating its land. This inverse-incentive effect may provoke countries into doing nothing against evergrowing population, keeping cost of life too affordable, and thus, ensuring that the next generation will be overpopulated, and thus, extenuating the land.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Unfortunately, with open (or even just somehow permeable) borders, any noticeable delta in lifestyle would just be gobbled up by slow population displacement from shamelessly breeding places. There at no panacea solutions. I envy those born a decade earlier and pity those born a decade later.
mola 6y ago
You cannot hinder developing countries from the comfort of living in a develop country. The fact that China agreed to a year is amazing. If the US would have kept part of that deal then maybe we would've seen improvements. But now that the US basically proven to be untrustworthy, even towards allies, these kind of deals are just undoable anymore. This will end in tears

mkoubaa 6y ago

Oh it certainly can get worse

umanwizard 6y ago

What does the election have to do with it? As far as I know, neither major candidate has a realistic plan for climate action.

sampo 6y ago

USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%. Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Right that makes sense, also https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
Isn't it bunk to apply extrapolation to two countries that start from a different per capita base? Germany is significantly lower in per capita emissions so their reduction is (I'm assuming) a lot harder to achieve. It's like comparing fat loss between someone who starts overweight vs someone who is starting neutral bmi. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=~USA#per-capita-how-much-co2-does-the-average-person-emit https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... and add Germany. Happy to hear why I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in stats or emissions.
tw04 6y ago
>USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%. Which is primarily due to Obama era regulations that Trump has done everything he can to roll back. Had the price of gas not skyrocketed and the mortgage crisis not hit, we would've had almost no improvements from 2000-2008. If you look at the data available from 2016-2018 we went BACKWARDS. You can't extrapolate the data from Obama's regulations that have rolled back and say: look it'll take care of itself.

macspoofing 6y ago

>4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. But that's not the case. America is reducing its emissions greatly by shifting from coal to natural gas (which mirrors what Germany is doing, for example). Coal is ostensibly dead in US. If you look at the charts from Wikipedia [1][2], you'll see the US has cut emissions at about the same rate (or faster) than Europe. That trend will continue. So what will Paris actually do in practical terms? The problem is that after transitioning away from coal, there isn't a clear answer about the next step. Renewables are not a panacea and may never be able to power a modern economy as they will probably always require fossil fuel baseload ... not to mention that because renewables are a diffuse energy source, they require HUGE land areas which makes no different for CO2 emissions, but makes a huge difference for environmental collapse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Per_Capita_CO2_by_Region.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Total_CO2_by_Region.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...

FerretFred 6y ago
>coal to natural gas Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
- est31 6y ago
  CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e.png https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/CO2-spez_e...
  - sampo 6y ago
    > CO2 per KWh is lower for natural gas than it is for coal. Unfortunately there are methane leaks in the systems, and it is quite possible that when accounting for the methane releases, natural gas has equally bad climate effect (emissions of CO2 and CH4 combined) as coal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ycombonator 6y ago

Has China signed on to this if so, have they shown verifiable reductions?

victor106 6y ago

Japan is racing to build coal plants while US is reducing https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/clim...

hourislate 6y ago

4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world Were you referring to China? They are still building coal plants at a record pace.

robomartin 6y ago

This is part of the fallacy in this mess that climate change has become. If the US evaporated from the planet, nothing would change. In fact, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise. Humanity cannot solve this problem by subtraction. If ALL of humanity left the planet, it would take 100,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2. That means we can’t solve it by eliminating fossil fuels, cars, trucks, planes, etc. We can’t solve it with solar panels. And we sure as heck know the Paris accord can’t solve it either. It is astounding to me to see see how we continue to talk about this problem from the perspective of a premise that is completely false. Source: 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Which European country are you in?

spaetzleesser 6y ago

As a European living in the US I think it’s time for Europe to stop looking at the US and start leading. If you are worried about climate change, there is plenty of stuff that can be done in Europe without the US. Europe could also take a strong lead in developing green technologies. Stop worrying about the US and stand on your own feet!

benhurmarcel 6y ago
Europe already does a lot more. 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...