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Increasingly, nations need to force the US and China to start cutting, not continue cutting their own emissions. Otherwise global will continue to rise and they

Increasingly, nations need to force the US and China to start cutting, not continue cutting their own emissions. Otherwise global will continue to rise and they'll be wasting their time.

dalbasal 6y ago
Maybe... but most efforts over the last decades to this end have been slow and hard. The alternative thesis is leadership by example. Putting these at odds has been a recipe for stalling, and both the US & China are examples of this. On that note, I think we should be using carbon reduction leadership more directly to generate industrial advantages within the EU. There are (should be) obvious advantages in getting to the future first. A lot of recent capital investment in green tech (eg tesla, panasonic, the chinese panel industry) were directly or indirectly supported by signals of long term demand (eg end dates for ICE vehicles) from european polities. EG: Telsa's investment case (besides the L5 autonomy case) is basically formed around a predicted adoption curve for electric vehicles. (Market Share)X(Market Size) for any given T. Long term investments need confident predictions of long term market size. Same for solar panels, battery tech, etc. Most of the footnotes supporting these predictions came from EU (member) politics. Not quite government guaranteed demand, but collectively credible nonetheless. There should be more effort to get this happening locally. The UK is no longer EU, but it's a nice legible example so let's use it. Scotland, and now the UK as a whole have been declaring that ICE vehicles will be banned by 2030. Whether that "ban" will really be a ban will be determined later, but that still puts one hell of a footnote on your market size predictions for 2030... directly translatable into hard capital investment. The EU (+UK) is big enough that a good chunk of this investment can be captured within it. There are costs to carbon reduction locally. Environmental benefits are more global. We should be capturing more of the economic benefits locally to even it out.
tengbretson 6y ago
US emissions have been steadily dropping. This information is absurdly easy to find. Given how shallow your understanding of the facts is, explain to me on what basis you have formed these ideas about what the US, China and other nations should start or stop doing.
- noobermin 6y ago
  Relative to when? If you choose 2005 on these graphs[0] then yes, or it can look flat like it does to me since 1990. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas... fig
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  US emissions are 17 tonnes of CO2 per capita. France is 5.5, the UK is 6. US emissions are down about 25 percent from peak. France cut theirs by 40 percent already. If some says "I accept the science and the responsibility, but I don't want to cut my emissions so fuck it", I might not like it but its honest. Pretending the US isn't vastly worse and making much less progress than other countries isn't even honest. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france?country=FRA~GBR~USA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france?country=FRA~GB...
imtringued 6y ago
That's true but you have no power over the actions of other countries. They can always decide to "defect". It's better to work on the problem domestically instead of pointing fingers.
titzer 6y ago
As emissions are cumulative, there is no wasting time by cutting your own emissions. Both is best, but change starts at home!
M2Ys4U 6y ago
We need both.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
Mainly, China has to work on cutting coal, and the USA has a stubbornly slow-to-green transportation sector. Then there's agriculture and manufacturing, those are much harder long term trends. I'm thinking EU and progressive US areas may drive cost premiums down for green options, so that then other economies can come in at lower price points afterwards.
hannob 6y ago
What you do in one country absolutely matters in another. Even the US has a significant portion of wind and solar these days. This didn't happen because Donald Trump (or anyone else responsible) made any ambitious climate decisions, it simply happened because policies of other countries made it so cheap that it happened through market forces. This isn't a solution for everything (there will be areas where the climate friendly solution will always be more expensive), but for example bringing down the prices of electrolyseurs would absolutely matter worldwide and is something the EU can do with policy.
freeflight 6y ago
Would already be a good start if the US wouldn't put foreign policy over the environment. That whole push to export subsidized US LNG, to places like Germany for the sole purpose of further depressing the Russian economy, is complete nonsense from an environmental and efficiency perspective.

Increasingly, nations need to force the US and China to start cutting, not continue cutting their own emissions. Otherwise global will continue to rise and they'll be wasting their time.

dalbasal 6y ago

Maybe... but most efforts over the last decades to this end have been slow and hard. The alternative thesis is leadership by example. Putting these at odds has been a recipe for stalling, and both the US & China are examples of this. On that note, I think we should be using carbon reduction leadership more directly to generate industrial advantages within the EU. There are (should be) obvious advantages in getting to the future first. A lot of recent capital investment in green tech (eg tesla, panasonic, the chinese panel industry) were directly or indirectly supported by signals of long term demand (eg end dates for ICE vehicles) from european polities. EG: Telsa's investment case (besides the L5 autonomy case) is basically formed around a predicted adoption curve for electric vehicles. (Market Share)X(Market Size) for any given T. Long term investments need confident predictions of long term market size. Same for solar panels, battery tech, etc. Most of the footnotes supporting these predictions came from EU (member) politics. Not quite government guaranteed demand, but collectively credible nonetheless. There should be more effort to get this happening locally. The UK is no longer EU, but it's a nice legible example so let's use it. Scotland, and now the UK as a whole have been declaring that ICE vehicles will be banned by 2030. Whether that "ban" will really be a ban will be determined later, but that still puts one hell of a footnote on your market size predictions for 2030... directly translatable into hard capital investment. The EU (+UK) is big enough that a good chunk of this investment can be captured within it. There are costs to carbon reduction locally. Environmental benefits are more global. We should be capturing more of the economic benefits locally to even it out.

tengbretson 6y ago

US emissions have been steadily dropping. This information is absurdly easy to find. Given how shallow your understanding of the facts is, explain to me on what basis you have formed these ideas about what the US, China and other nations should start or stop doing.

noobermin 6y ago
Relative to when? If you choose 2005 on these graphs[0] then yes, or it can look flat like it does to me since 1990. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas... fig
LatteLazy 6y ago
US emissions are 17 tonnes of CO2 per capita. France is 5.5, the UK is 6. US emissions are down about 25 percent from peak. France cut theirs by 40 percent already. If some says "I accept the science and the responsibility, but I don't want to cut my emissions so fuck it", I might not like it but its honest. Pretending the US isn't vastly worse and making much less progress than other countries isn't even honest. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france?country=FRA~GBR~USA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france?country=FRA~GB...

imtringued 6y ago

That's true but you have no power over the actions of other countries. They can always decide to "defect". It's better to work on the problem domestically instead of pointing fingers.

titzer 6y ago

As emissions are cumulative, there is no wasting time by cutting your own emissions. Both is best, but change starts at home!

M2Ys4U 6y ago

We need both.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

Mainly, China has to work on cutting coal, and the USA has a stubbornly slow-to-green transportation sector. Then there's agriculture and manufacturing, those are much harder long term trends. I'm thinking EU and progressive US areas may drive cost premiums down for green options, so that then other economies can come in at lower price points afterwards.

hannob 6y ago

What you do in one country absolutely matters in another. Even the US has a significant portion of wind and solar these days. This didn't happen because Donald Trump (or anyone else responsible) made any ambitious climate decisions, it simply happened because policies of other countries made it so cheap that it happened through market forces. This isn't a solution for everything (there will be areas where the climate friendly solution will always be more expensive), but for example bringing down the prices of electrolyseurs would absolutely matter worldwide and is something the EU can do with policy.

freeflight 6y ago

Would already be a good start if the US wouldn't put foreign policy over the environment. That whole push to export subsidized US LNG, to places like Germany for the sole purpose of further depressing the Russian economy, is complete nonsense from an environmental and efficiency perspective.