8 ms·

I think you're mischaracterizing the nature of the problem. Take a look at [1] for example - US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been drop

I think you're mischaracterizing the nature of the problem. Take a look at [1] for example - US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole [2]. So where is the increase in CO2 emissions each year coming from then? The developing world that wants a western world standard of living. Take a look at India for example [3]. It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. Would you like to tell people that? By all means, we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb... [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/greenhouse-gas-emission-trends-6/assessment-3 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/greenhous... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india

2143 4y ago
Any suggestions about what [people of] India can do?
- qart 4y ago
  Indians have other ecological problems on our hands. Unchecked pollution (air, water, soil), poorly designed cities, burning stubble, etc. On per-capita CO2/CH4, India is doing great.
- adrianN 4y ago
  The same that everybody else can do: elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.
  - 2143 4y ago
    > The same that everybody else can First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there. > elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants. I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable. Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period. Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort. [1] https://www.ey.com/en_sg/recai https://www.ey.com/en_sg/recai
    - ben_w 4y ago
      > The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there. That's been said about every nation. So, what exactly do you mean?
    - airbreather 4y ago
      Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat. Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think. We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse. And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus. Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy. Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time. Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hackerlight 4y ago
You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  yeah, we'll just share our star trek free/clean/infinite energy tech
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates. Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits. Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.
    - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - adrianN 4y ago
    You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.
    - 4y ago
beebeepka 4y ago
Interesting post. You are very much aware that it's the wealthy who do most of the damage, yet you somehow blame the so called developing world but don't want to be the to tell them to fuck off. Am I misreading what you said?
- junofan 4y ago
  I think they’re saying economic development in other places will create emissions that dwarf any mitigation achievable in today’s economically developed regions. Any plan that doesn’t address this likely scenario probably won’t work.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    I gathered as much. What I really wanted to hear is what this person think should be done about it.
adrianN 4y ago
Nobody forces developing countries to go through the same process as developed countries for raising the standard of living. We have the technology to achieve a very good standard of living with very low carbon emissions. It's not that much more expensive than burning fossil fuels either.
bambax 4y ago
The reason why the West emissions are (slowly) decreasing is not because it's getting more sober or efficient, but because it is exporting emitting activities to the rest if the world. We are shuffling emissions around, which at a global scale is pointless.
lukeplato 4y ago
It doesn't look like the links you provided show enough evidence to support the claim that CO2 emissions per capita are the result of poorer countries increasing their standard of living (it could be the result of industries that trade with wealthy countries to increase their std of living), but I would really like to see that idea explored and properly proven
jcranmer 4y ago
If you look at history, you don't economically catch up to the top dogs of the world by aping their technology. You catch up to them by leapfrogging them in technology--the newer technology allows you to undercut them, while throttling them of the cash necessary to retool to use newer technology. This is most historically most prominent in something like steelmaking.
jimbokun 4y ago
> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so. South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    We tell them with loans. Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front. The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- makomk 4y ago
  If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries. My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.
RobertoG 4y ago
Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance. The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  Russia has made the military very not unnecessary
  - RobertoG 4y ago
    When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting. Anyway, if you are talking about the USA military budget, that's just nonsense. Just check the numbers.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      > When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting. You can ask, but you won't get it. Disarmament, and I don't just mean nuclear, requires a level of trust that simply does not exist, because a relatively small group defecting (in the game theory sense) would be able to conquer the world.
      - RobertoG 4y ago
        It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear. In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.
        ben_w 4y ago
        > It has been done in the past What are you referring to? Because this sounds too implausible for us to be talking about the same category of thing.
tejohnso 4y ago
I'm saying people haven't sufficiently engaged with the severity of the problem for optimism to be relevant. You're trying to frame this as a rich vs poor situation, and talking about potential solutions and their likely effectiveness. I think your post would've been better as a top level comment because it has nothing to do with what I was saying.
tmaly 4y ago
This reminds me a little bit of “jackpot” in William Gibson’s latest novels.
isignal 4y ago
1. Breaking this down by country doesn’t make much sense. Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view. 2. India/China are ramping up solar and wind but it is a relatively poor country. Such investments should be funded by countries that have already “developed” and have the ability to fund such change.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view. How so? Aren't most emissions generated by industry rather than by individuals?
nathanaldensr 4y ago
Populations will not accept limitations on energy availability, no matter what goal is lauded. Look at Sri Lanka: the president fled and the people took over his opulent home. This will happen everywhere given enough pressure. All artificial energy restriction scams are doomed to fail for this very reason. They will all usher in even lower-trust societies than exist now.
moritzwarhier 4y ago
Your post contains three sources, but I respectfully have to say I consider it completely misleading. There is no real evidence "decoupling", that is GDP growth combined with stagnation or decline in resource consumption and emissions. All studies that are widely cited claiming that European and other western industrialized nations have achieved any measurable reduction in per-capita emissions and resource consumption have, to my knowledge, been debunked. > US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole Economic growth depends on very material and observable effects on the physical world. I admit that I only looked closely at your first link, but arguing against this trope again and again is tiring. So far I feel that all of these statistics have gaping logical holes, the worst and most obvious being considering "territorial emissions". Your first link seems to suffer from that too, at least at first glance. It is outrageous to me that questioning "Green capitalism" is still considered a fringe position. I can recommend e.g. this read (don't focus on the relatively tame headline): https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk... > we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem. I agree, at least in part. But your conclusions are off to me. Solar panels on the roof should mostly a net-positive thing (or net negative after a couple of years, in terms of emissions). The more widely deployed, the better. What a pity that they are not widely deployed. Seems to be a systemic problem, fracking and coal are more lucrative. Also they can ot offset an ever-increasing resource demand, eco-blind urban planning etc in their own. That's a problem with most of the "eco products" out there. We don't just need a new product, we need new politics. As far as I know, western countries have not effectively reduced their per-capita emissions or resource consumption. At best, temporarily in times of recession, but the overall trend remains upwards. . Even countries with stagnating population numbers keep on broadening the trail of destruction they impose on the world. The way we delude ourselves into being "ahead in green progress" compared to developing nations sounds to me very neo-colonialistic and delusional. Your comment hints at this fact, but only in a away that most people seem to paraphrase with "India matters, while us accelerating the global depletion of NNRs and raise of emission does not". I feel like most coverage of climate change and environmental is purposefully framed in a way that implies there was no alternative to growth and capitalism. Also downplaying the scale of the problem and how we continue to perpetuate it. The spurious statistics mostly reward countries that let others do the "dirt work" for them, sustaining absurd excesses of the rich and the population clashing over the "trickle-down" remains.
411111111111111 4y ago
This is so misleading it's not even funny anymore. The USA and Europe have both delegated most high CO2 footprint industries to the developing nations through globalisation. It wouldn't be going down if we hadn't. The issue isn't the evil developing nations which want to get the same quality of life. That contributes too, obviously... but making it sound as if the developed world has already gotten on the right track is incredibly misguided

2143 4y ago

Any suggestions about what [people of] India can do?

qart 4y ago
Indians have other ecological problems on our hands. Unchecked pollution (air, water, soil), poorly designed cities, burning stubble, etc. On per-capita CO2/CH4, India is doing great.
adrianN 4y ago
The same that everybody else can do: elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.
- 2143 4y ago
  > The same that everybody else can First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there. > elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants. I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable. Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period. Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort. [1] https://www.ey.com/en_sg/recai https://www.ey.com/en_sg/recai
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there. That's been said about every nation. So, what exactly do you mean?
  - airbreather 4y ago
    Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat. Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think. We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse. And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus. Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy. Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time. Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hackerlight 4y ago

You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
yeah, we'll just share our star trek free/clean/infinite energy tech
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates. Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits. Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.
  - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- adrianN 4y ago
  You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.
  - 4y ago

beebeepka 4y ago

Interesting post. You are very much aware that it's the wealthy who do most of the damage, yet you somehow blame the so called developing world but don't want to be the to tell them to fuck off. Am I misreading what you said?

junofan 4y ago
I think they’re saying economic development in other places will create emissions that dwarf any mitigation achievable in today’s economically developed regions. Any plan that doesn’t address this likely scenario probably won’t work.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I gathered as much. What I really wanted to hear is what this person think should be done about it.

adrianN 4y ago

Nobody forces developing countries to go through the same process as developed countries for raising the standard of living. We have the technology to achieve a very good standard of living with very low carbon emissions. It's not that much more expensive than burning fossil fuels either.

bambax 4y ago

The reason why the West emissions are (slowly) decreasing is not because it's getting more sober or efficient, but because it is exporting emitting activities to the rest if the world. We are shuffling emissions around, which at a global scale is pointless.

lukeplato 4y ago

It doesn't look like the links you provided show enough evidence to support the claim that CO2 emissions per capita are the result of poorer countries increasing their standard of living (it could be the result of industries that trade with wealthy countries to increase their std of living), but I would really like to see that idea explored and properly proven

jcranmer 4y ago

If you look at history, you don't economically catch up to the top dogs of the world by aping their technology. You catch up to them by leapfrogging them in technology--the newer technology allows you to undercut them, while throttling them of the cash necessary to retool to use newer technology. This is most historically most prominent in something like steelmaking.

jimbokun 4y ago

> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so. South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  We tell them with loans. Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front. The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
makomk 4y ago
If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries. My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.

RobertoG 4y ago

Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance. The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.

Pet_Ant 4y ago
Russia has made the military very not unnecessary
- RobertoG 4y ago
  When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting. Anyway, if you are talking about the USA military budget, that's just nonsense. Just check the numbers.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting. You can ask, but you won't get it. Disarmament, and I don't just mean nuclear, requires a level of trust that simply does not exist, because a relatively small group defecting (in the game theory sense) would be able to conquer the world.
    - RobertoG 4y ago
      It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear. In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        > It has been done in the past What are you referring to? Because this sounds too implausible for us to be talking about the same category of thing.

tejohnso 4y ago

I'm saying people haven't sufficiently engaged with the severity of the problem for optimism to be relevant. You're trying to frame this as a rich vs poor situation, and talking about potential solutions and their likely effectiveness. I think your post would've been better as a top level comment because it has nothing to do with what I was saying.

tmaly 4y ago

This reminds me a little bit of “jackpot” in William Gibson’s latest novels.

isignal 4y ago

1. Breaking this down by country doesn’t make much sense. Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view. 2. India/China are ramping up solar and wind but it is a relatively poor country. Such investments should be funded by countries that have already “developed” and have the ability to fund such change.

josephcsible 4y ago
> Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view. How so? Aren't most emissions generated by industry rather than by individuals?

nathanaldensr 4y ago

Populations will not accept limitations on energy availability, no matter what goal is lauded. Look at Sri Lanka: the president fled and the people took over his opulent home. This will happen everywhere given enough pressure. All artificial energy restriction scams are doomed to fail for this very reason. They will all usher in even lower-trust societies than exist now.

moritzwarhier 4y ago

Your post contains three sources, but I respectfully have to say I consider it completely misleading. There is no real evidence "decoupling", that is GDP growth combined with stagnation or decline in resource consumption and emissions. All studies that are widely cited claiming that European and other western industrialized nations have achieved any measurable reduction in per-capita emissions and resource consumption have, to my knowledge, been debunked. > US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole Economic growth depends on very material and observable effects on the physical world. I admit that I only looked closely at your first link, but arguing against this trope again and again is tiring. So far I feel that all of these statistics have gaping logical holes, the worst and most obvious being considering "territorial emissions". Your first link seems to suffer from that too, at least at first glance. It is outrageous to me that questioning "Green capitalism" is still considered a fringe position. I can recommend e.g. this read (don't focus on the relatively tame headline): https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk... > we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem. I agree, at least in part. But your conclusions are off to me. Solar panels on the roof should mostly a net-positive thing (or net negative after a couple of years, in terms of emissions). The more widely deployed, the better. What a pity that they are not widely deployed. Seems to be a systemic problem, fracking and coal are more lucrative. Also they can ot offset an ever-increasing resource demand, eco-blind urban planning etc in their own. That's a problem with most of the "eco products" out there. We don't just need a new product, we need new politics. As far as I know, western countries have not effectively reduced their per-capita emissions or resource consumption. At best, temporarily in times of recession, but the overall trend remains upwards. . Even countries with stagnating population numbers keep on broadening the trail of destruction they impose on the world. The way we delude ourselves into being "ahead in green progress" compared to developing nations sounds to me very neo-colonialistic and delusional. Your comment hints at this fact, but only in a away that most people seem to paraphrase with "India matters, while us accelerating the global depletion of NNRs and raise of emission does not". I feel like most coverage of climate change and environmental is purposefully framed in a way that implies there was no alternative to growth and capitalism. Also downplaying the scale of the problem and how we continue to perpetuate it. The spurious statistics mostly reward countries that let others do the "dirt work" for them, sustaining absurd excesses of the rich and the population clashing over the "trickle-down" remains.

411111111111111 4y ago

This is so misleading it's not even funny anymore. The USA and Europe have both delegated most high CO2 footprint industries to the developing nations through globalisation. It wouldn't be going down if we hadn't. The issue isn't the evil developing nations which want to get the same quality of life. That contributes too, obviously... but making it sound as if the developed world has already gotten on the right track is incredibly misguided