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I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since th

by bko 5y ago

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this problem but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...

908B64B197 5y ago
> while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I'm personally completely in favor of import tariffs on goods manufactured abroad with dirty energy and immigration quotas on nationals from countries that have decided not to control their emissions.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  What does immigration have to do with CO2?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Rich Chinese are obsessed with acquiring western passports. Making it harder will incentivize them to work harder at home to fix their country's horrible environmental record.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Those stats are not fair because China is the world's factory. If China decides to stop exporting manufactured products to reduce it's emissions, the US would need to manufacture itself, increasing it's emissions.
- bko 5y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" > Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted. 2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a totla of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    I loath it when statistics with titles like that are published. The biggest amount of greenhouse gasses that china emits is from coal power plants. Naturally, figuring out what amount of electricity was used in the production of the exported goods is basically impossible, which is why its considered consumption in their data. I'm sure the spirit of it is still correct (that most of their co2 emissions are for internal products/usage), but its hard to take that conclusion at face value when they didn't even mention the caveat that they ignore the by far biggest contributor of their emissions and consider it consumption by default.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Exactly. We have moved the problem around, but we are not actually getting around to living differently.
thenightcrawler 5y ago
To be fair You could say 2020 was due to lack of car emmissions?
scoofy 5y ago
We need to essentially be net negative. Note that 3/4th of the area under that graph... is literally not visible because it doesn't start from zero.
magicalist 5y ago
> but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age. Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything? OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are great but not nearly sufficient.
- bko 5y ago
  I don't get what you're asking. US emissions per capita have been going down considerably since ~2000 without too much prodding or political will. As have Europes. If you look at the chart, there are only three countries with growing per capita emissions and that's China Russia and India, but most dramatically China. I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emissions-on-a-per-capita-basis-report-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
  - NumberWangMan 5y ago
    This is where border adjustments come into play. We can, for example, implement a carbon tax in the US and impose a tariff on goods from other countries depending on their own environmental policies. This serves as a way to put pressure on all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together. In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seems like the Chinese government is looking toward expanding their existing policies to cover more industries in an attempt to avoid the EU border adjustment). Another way to look at it is that given how much the USA has already contributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, China would need to continue at their current levels for another 30 or so years before they catch up with us -- and that's with about 4x the population. I understand that that argument may not be persuasive to some, though, because a lot of the manufacturing and technological development that took place in the USA over that time benefited many countries. And a lot of those emissions took place prior to the wide knowledge of how serious climate change is. So I'd really say that we should aim for net zero emissions because it's the right thing to do. Everyone has to do it, and it's not going to happen if we all stand around waiting for someone else to go first. There is a pretty massive amount of emissions cutting we could do without much effort at all, and if the rest is spread out over a number of years, the cost will be very small, and will have a lot of benefits to people's health. (Climate change is not the only negative externality of burning fossil fuels by a long shot.) The place to start is a carbon tax. I highly recommend that everyone who cares about climate change call congress (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-about-the-energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-ab...) and ask them to support a carbon tax.
jaredklewis 5y ago
I feel your comment is too soft on America. The US's emissions per capita is more than 3 times the worldwide average. So we still need to cut our emissions by a factor of 3 just to be average. But considering we are the richest country in the world, I think it's reasonable we attempt to display some leadership by having below average emissions. And that's not even mentioning that the fact that of course current worldwide emissions per capita are far too high, so we really need to cut even more. Meanwhile, China's emission per capita are roughly half that of the US. Even considering the the meager progress made by the US in the past decades to reduce emissions, we are still the 4th most emitting nation per capita.
- noxer 5y ago
  >...so we really need to cut even more This is the whole pitch of the green movement. Reduce emissions at whatever cost, they completely miss the point that we (the humans on this planet) dont know how to do this. Its not about what we should do its about figuring out how and until we know how there is not much point in making peoples life harder and make them feel bad for doing what they have to do. Or make placebo progress like biofuel and other nonsense. The earth overshoot day in 2021 is on July 29. Its not hard to figure out that we are nowhere near sustainable and all the proposed cuts and implemented policies did so far is insignificantly reduce the GROWTH of global emissions. We need real solutions, technological progress of the magnitude of the last 100 years or something like that to make any relevant difference. Not telling people how bad they are for the environment and how they can feel better by doing mostly useless stuff like carefully separating trash for the recycling-fraud industry.
  - jaredklewis 5y ago
    The great majority of the world's population lives in countries with per capita emissions less than a third of the US's. Humans "know how." It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute. Nor would it take a tech breakthrough for the US government to stop giving fossil fuel companies $20b/year in tax credits and subsidies. Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels. If we can spend $2 trillion plus in middle eastern wars of dubious value, surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries. No new tech is needed. A modicum of will is all that is required.
orf 5y ago
So you’re saying 300m people in the US generate only half as many emissions as 1.4 billion people living in a country that is basically the worlds factory? And you think that’s OK?

by bko 5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

> while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I'm personally completely in favor of import tariffs on goods manufactured abroad with dirty energy and immigration quotas on nationals from countries that have decided not to control their emissions.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
What does immigration have to do with CO2?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Rich Chinese are obsessed with acquiring western passports. Making it harder will incentivize them to work harder at home to fix their country's horrible environmental record.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Those stats are not fair because China is the world's factory. If China decides to stop exporting manufactured products to reduce it's emissions, the US would need to manufacture itself, increasing it's emissions.

bko 5y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" > Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted. 2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a totla of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  I loath it when statistics with titles like that are published. The biggest amount of greenhouse gasses that china emits is from coal power plants. Naturally, figuring out what amount of electricity was used in the production of the exported goods is basically impossible, which is why its considered consumption in their data. I'm sure the spirit of it is still correct (that most of their co2 emissions are for internal products/usage), but its hard to take that conclusion at face value when they didn't even mention the caveat that they ignore the by far biggest contributor of their emissions and consider it consumption by default.
ddingus 5y ago
Exactly. We have moved the problem around, but we are not actually getting around to living differently.

thenightcrawler 5y ago

To be fair You could say 2020 was due to lack of car emmissions?

scoofy 5y ago

We need to essentially be net negative. Note that 3/4th of the area under that graph... is literally not visible because it doesn't start from zero.

magicalist 5y ago

> but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age. Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything? OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are great but not nearly sufficient.

bko 5y ago
I don't get what you're asking. US emissions per capita have been going down considerably since ~2000 without too much prodding or political will. As have Europes. If you look at the chart, there are only three countries with growing per capita emissions and that's China Russia and India, but most dramatically China. I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emissions-on-a-per-capita-basis-report-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
- NumberWangMan 5y ago
  This is where border adjustments come into play. We can, for example, implement a carbon tax in the US and impose a tariff on goods from other countries depending on their own environmental policies. This serves as a way to put pressure on all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together. In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seems like the Chinese government is looking toward expanding their existing policies to cover more industries in an attempt to avoid the EU border adjustment). Another way to look at it is that given how much the USA has already contributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, China would need to continue at their current levels for another 30 or so years before they catch up with us -- and that's with about 4x the population. I understand that that argument may not be persuasive to some, though, because a lot of the manufacturing and technological development that took place in the USA over that time benefited many countries. And a lot of those emissions took place prior to the wide knowledge of how serious climate change is. So I'd really say that we should aim for net zero emissions because it's the right thing to do. Everyone has to do it, and it's not going to happen if we all stand around waiting for someone else to go first. There is a pretty massive amount of emissions cutting we could do without much effort at all, and if the rest is spread out over a number of years, the cost will be very small, and will have a lot of benefits to people's health. (Climate change is not the only negative externality of burning fossil fuels by a long shot.) The place to start is a carbon tax. I highly recommend that everyone who cares about climate change call congress (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-about-the-energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-ab...) and ask them to support a carbon tax.

jaredklewis 5y ago

I feel your comment is too soft on America. The US's emissions per capita is more than 3 times the worldwide average. So we still need to cut our emissions by a factor of 3 just to be average. But considering we are the richest country in the world, I think it's reasonable we attempt to display some leadership by having below average emissions. And that's not even mentioning that the fact that of course current worldwide emissions per capita are far too high, so we really need to cut even more. Meanwhile, China's emission per capita are roughly half that of the US. Even considering the the meager progress made by the US in the past decades to reduce emissions, we are still the 4th most emitting nation per capita.

noxer 5y ago
>...so we really need to cut even more This is the whole pitch of the green movement. Reduce emissions at whatever cost, they completely miss the point that we (the humans on this planet) dont know how to do this. Its not about what we should do its about figuring out how and until we know how there is not much point in making peoples life harder and make them feel bad for doing what they have to do. Or make placebo progress like biofuel and other nonsense. The earth overshoot day in 2021 is on July 29. Its not hard to figure out that we are nowhere near sustainable and all the proposed cuts and implemented policies did so far is insignificantly reduce the GROWTH of global emissions. We need real solutions, technological progress of the magnitude of the last 100 years or something like that to make any relevant difference. Not telling people how bad they are for the environment and how they can feel better by doing mostly useless stuff like carefully separating trash for the recycling-fraud industry.
- jaredklewis 5y ago
  The great majority of the world's population lives in countries with per capita emissions less than a third of the US's. Humans "know how." It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute. Nor would it take a tech breakthrough for the US government to stop giving fossil fuel companies $20b/year in tax credits and subsidies. Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels. If we can spend $2 trillion plus in middle eastern wars of dubious value, surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries. No new tech is needed. A modicum of will is all that is required.

orf 5y ago

So you’re saying 300m people in the US generate only half as many emissions as 1.4 billion people living in a country that is basically the worlds factory? And you think that’s OK?