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Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27

Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse gases in 2019. Any version of a "green new deal" changes nothing globally until China and several other major polluting nations join the fight.

Syonyk 5y ago
How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 emissions to those nations instead? If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes? Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user. Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
- quicklime 5y ago
  Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed emissions back to household consumption: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environmental_Impact_Assessment_of_Household_Consumption https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the area, the more the impact." I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer. If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    The only fair way is to attribute some to the purchaser and some to the seller. Both parties have benefited from the transaction and neither party has paid the associated social cost.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could have an impact if enough people stopped spending discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of course, is nobody thinks they're part of the problem.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as possible. I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time). It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand. I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.
- belorn 5y ago
  The assumption used when you move the pollution to the end user is that environmental regulations does not exist. An product produced through coal power with little regard to the environment is assumed to be cause the same emission if produced where the end user is. In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your location produced it. If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing to the country with the worst environmental standards, having any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and have no impact on the environment. It also give little incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce emissions. One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now that is not a very popular concept.
- vimy 5y ago
  > Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import... Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix. Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
rocknor 5y ago
So? Consumption CO2 per capita is what really matters. https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$filter$dimensions$country$country$/$in@=usa&=chn&=can&=fra&=gbr&=deu&=aus&=ind&=bra&=nga&=jpn;;;;;;&encoding$y$data$concept=consumption_emissions_tonnes_per_person&space@=country&=time;;&scale$type=linear&domain:null&zoomed:null;;&frame$value=2017;;;;;&chart-type=linechart&url=v1 https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
- b3n 5y ago
  Why is that what really matters? Having fewer children makes a big difference which is invisible by this metric. What really matters is the negative impact on the environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the population size mother nature isn't congratulating us.
  - rocknor 5y ago
    That is what really matters because we can't really do much about population. We could talk about population if we had unusually high birth rates, but that's not true. A high birth rate was the default state of all humanity pre-industrialization. Poor countries with high birth rates that plummet as they get richer is normal. A large portion of the world is still poor. Every highly developed country used to have extremely high birth rates in the past. There is nothing unusual about this, this is standard demographic transition. If you care about freedom, you can't just force poor countries to have fewer children. You have to wait for them to get richer and develop, and birth rates will drop automatically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
wussboy 5y ago
There's not a single thing we can do? Where do China's products get sold? Here. So it seems to me like there's lots we can do.
shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
Everyone everywhere has to lower emmissions. The USA historically has produced the most carbon, it also has one of the highest carbon emmissions per capita. You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more. Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point? The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.

Syonyk 5y ago

How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 emissions to those nations instead? If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes? Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user. Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.

quicklime 5y ago
Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed emissions back to household consumption: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environmental_Impact_Assessment_of_Household_Consumption https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the area, the more the impact." I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer. If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  The only fair way is to attribute some to the purchaser and some to the seller. Both parties have benefited from the transaction and neither party has paid the associated social cost.
lhorie 5y ago
Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could have an impact if enough people stopped spending discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of course, is nobody thinks they're part of the problem.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as possible. I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time). It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand. I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.
belorn 5y ago
The assumption used when you move the pollution to the end user is that environmental regulations does not exist. An product produced through coal power with little regard to the environment is assumed to be cause the same emission if produced where the end user is. In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your location produced it. If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing to the country with the worst environmental standards, having any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and have no impact on the environment. It also give little incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce emissions. One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now that is not a very popular concept.
vimy 5y ago
> Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import... Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix. Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.

rocknor 5y ago

So? Consumption CO2 per capita is what really matters. https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$filter$dimensions$country$country$/$in@=usa&=chn&=can&=fra&=gbr&=deu&=aus&=ind&=bra&=nga&=jpn;;;;;;&encoding$y$data$concept=consumption_emissions_tonnes_per_person&space@=country&=time;;&scale$type=linear&domain:null&zoomed:null;;&frame$value=2017;;;;;&chart-type=linechart&url=v1 https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...

b3n 5y ago
Why is that what really matters? Having fewer children makes a big difference which is invisible by this metric. What really matters is the negative impact on the environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the population size mother nature isn't congratulating us.
- rocknor 5y ago
  That is what really matters because we can't really do much about population. We could talk about population if we had unusually high birth rates, but that's not true. A high birth rate was the default state of all humanity pre-industrialization. Poor countries with high birth rates that plummet as they get richer is normal. A large portion of the world is still poor. Every highly developed country used to have extremely high birth rates in the past. There is nothing unusual about this, this is standard demographic transition. If you care about freedom, you can't just force poor countries to have fewer children. You have to wait for them to get richer and develop, and birth rates will drop automatically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

wussboy 5y ago

There's not a single thing we can do? Where do China's products get sold? Here. So it seems to me like there's lots we can do.

shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago

Everyone everywhere has to lower emmissions. The USA historically has produced the most carbon, it also has one of the highest carbon emmissions per capita. You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more. Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point? The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.