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China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the

China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc. The PCA is a joke that gives these countries essentially unlimited ability to continually move their own goalposts for "peak carbon", no real difficult sacrifices required for them until after they've reached that moving target. China has been infamous for decades for not even having reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naïvety, irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma demanding ideological conformance? The harsh reality nobody on the political left in the west has the courage to acknowledge that climate change is 100% out of the control of our WEIRD (wealthy, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries, and no amount of self flagellation over "climate racism", nor vicious hostility towards "climate change deniers", nor radical proposals to destroy the entire energy grid is going to make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket" difference in climate change. Climate dogma is the TSA to climate change's terrorism - wasteful, ineffective theatrical performance art that degrades everyone's quality of life while doing effectively nothing to address the actual problem, intended strictly to appease the neuroticism of the shmucks dumb enough to believe it makes a difference. I get that this sounds pessimistic, cynical, and even a little misanthropic, but it's also what the actual data is telling us. This isn't a fight we can win with the way things are done in China not changing. Totalitarian demands for ideological conformance present an impenetrable barrier for "real" progression of humanity in virtually every aspect in every country where they are practiced, including the climate change cult itself in the US.

dimitrios1 4y ago
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- teg4n_ 4y ago
  how does that have anything to do with the alt-right??
- anonym29 4y ago
  This is not what I am advocating for. To be unequivocally clear, I absolutely do believe in man-made climate change, and that the solution to it cannot be found down the path of ignoring it.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  How is "Accelerate the wealth generation in developing nations" an alt-right idea?
  - altrigjtroll 4y ago
    [dead]
AlecSchueler 4y ago
This sort of ignores the global nature of our supply chains though. Someone can be very green in life here in the EU because all the products they buy are manufactured in China and their environmental impact is externalised and put onto the stats of another country that's trying to meet our demands. By regulating what's available on markets here we can pressure maufacturers elsewhere. What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.
- anonym29 4y ago
  I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from eloquent bitching, which I can certainly be fairly accused of. That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either. The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions.
  - ireflect 4y ago
    You are a very good writer and I’m intrigued by this thread. Can you elaborate on what you see as actual solutions and how they would look (no matter how far fetched)?
    - anonym29 4y ago
      Thank you for the complement. I'm under no delusion that I have the solutions to the whole world's problems figured out. These ideas are like unrefined chunks of coal, rife with imperfections and riddled with flaws and only under the great pressure and heat of vigorous, critical debate may they ever hope to become diamonds. I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions? At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution. Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not. Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now. These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first. Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes. Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> This isn't a fight we can win The right doesn't even believe that climate change is real, they aren't participating in any fight.
- anonym29 4y ago
  Declaring your own countrymen an enemy in a war that countries five times our size is winning is not going to convince them to join your side.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > Declaring your own countrymen an enemy This is historically more of a right-wing phenomenon in the US. Though I concede it is becoming stronger on the left in recent years, as their frustration boils over. Seems they've finally concluded that the right wing will never be coming to the table in good faith, so might as well fight fire with fire. We're all losing.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    They're my enemy because they already declared me theirs.
nluken 4y ago
I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0 difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e. reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to do that regardless. Also don't dismiss that doing these things puts international pressure on developing nations to clean up their energy as demand increases. Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions until they do first. Reducing carbon domestically is necessary to try to reduce it abroad.
- hammock 4y ago
  >I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? We could compel China and other countries, by diplomatic and other means
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    That sorta requires you to lead by example, first.
    - hammock 4y ago
      Does it? The US is currently compelling Russia to give up its claims in eastern Ukraine, despite occupying whole parts of Syria and other places itself
      - trasz3 4y ago
        US hasn’t invaded Syria in a colonial war. They also didn’t commit genocide in Syria.
        hammock 4y ago
        Someone might want to tell the people of Syria. >"The Syrian Arab Republic affirms that the practices of the United States of America and the illegal presence of its forces on parts of the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic is an actual embodiment of the crime of aggression," the Syrian Mission to the United Nations told Newsweek. >"Syria stresses that the lies promoted by the U.S. administration are nothing but a failed attempt to justify the acts of aggression and the flagrant violation of the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic," https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-forever-war-1792298 https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-for...
dzader 4y ago
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- anonym29 4y ago
  Do you intend to refute any part of what I actually said, or just to engage in unproductive name-calling?
  - dzader 4y ago
    [flagged]
solarkraft 4y ago
> I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc. Can't convince the others to do it if you don't do it.
- anonym29 4y ago
  Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely asking China and India to get on board this century working so far? I'm not saying we shouldn't be taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint in the west, I'm saying that doing that and hoping that other countries will voluntarily join us isn't working.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely asking China and India to get on board this century working so far? Yes. Western shifts to less-harmful methods and materials increases the size of the market for those methods and materials and lowers their costs, spurring adoption in places not as rich as the West. The early adoption of solar panels in the west drives production capacity in poorer nations that are more manufacturing-oriented. The increased production capacity increases supply, which lowers prices, which makes it more affordable for them to transition to solar (and other technologies). International conventions, treaties, and agreements headed by richer nations bring along poorer nations. In the US, harmful emissions like CO2 and GHG plateaued in the 70s and 80s and started declining on both a total and per-capita basis in the 2000s. They are still much, MUCH, higher than the rest of the world but are declining. In China and India emissions have started to slow their rate of increase or have plateaued in the last 10 years. China went from ~5% of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear in 2000 to 15% in 2019. The US was at approximately 40% in 2020. Given the rates of change China will probably surpass the United States in renewable/nuclear generation as a percentage of their electricity generation in 10-20 years. I would expect the emissions curves to mimic those of Europe and the United States, lagging by 30-40 years. This is a decades-long effort, not something that can be realized in years. The infrastructure built 20 years ago still has 30 years left in it, so the targets we want to hit in 50 years need to be planned for and built today. But as for your question "the strategy of doing it ourselves" isn't really valid. Each individual American emits roughly 3x the amount of CO2 that a Chinese person does. We're not "doing it ourselves" we are barely sacrificing anything while expecting people poorer than us to do what we don't want to do. https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Continents_percapita.png https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Continen...
nemo44x 4y ago
We just need to convince all the people in poor and up and coming countries to stay poor.
babypuncher 4y ago
The ban on CFCs has been a huge success and likely prevented an awful lot of melanoma. It's a similar story with leaded gasoline. I'll never understand this argument. "Why should we care about our health if {insert poor country here} doesn't care about theirs"? It's just a convenient excuse to keep making the problem worse and worse. The correct solution here is to find the culprits and pressure them into complying with international goals, not just give up and turn the Earth into an inhospitable furnace.
Leary 4y ago
If you look at cumulative historical emissions, whether CO2 or HFCs, it is the West that produced the majority of the pollutants that is currently in the atmosphere. The west, therefore should bare the majority of the responsibility for their actions since they produced this tremendous externality when they were industrializing.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  It sounds like you're arguing we should be cool with China destroying the environment because some other countries already damaged it. Am I understanding your argument correctly?
- ftrobro 4y ago
  USA is the only western country in the top five for historical CO2 emissions since 1850 (unless you consider Brazil a western country): https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-historically-responsible-for-climate-change/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-his...
christkv 4y ago
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Pxtl 4y ago
Realistically, China is playing both sides here and everybody knows it. On the one hand, they know there's no real political consequence for polluting yet - they're happy to loot the commons as hard as they can. On the other hand, China is also investing a furious amount of money into green tech, doing multiple moonshots at a time on this stuff. So when the world does start to enforce standards globally, they'll be in the winning position. So in this era where nobody is putting in an earnest effort on climate change, they're winnning... and the day we switch over to caring and enforcing the rules globally, they'll keep on winning.
asperous 4y ago
We don't have to trust their numbers, we have satellites that can monitor the emission levels. The US pollutes at roughly twice the amount on a per person basis as China. In addition we "outsource" some of our pollution to them by them doing our manufacturing. It's tough to both raise the standard of living (reduce poverty) while also reducing pollution but China has a lot of initiatives to be more green; for examples 150 new nuclear reactors planned in the next 15 years. They benefit from the better air quality so it's a goal for them.
- bluGill 4y ago
  The trends are the US is reducing emissions. I'm not sure what China us doing (I know they build a lot of solar, but i'm not clear if they are also building coal power plants)
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    They are building, buying, and using a lot of coal, but that's mostly a temporary regression in their environmentalism from a significant economic reduction. Remember, at one point they were literally closing their airports because it's too smoggy to operate safely. China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global warming was not a concern, simply because they don't like the lost productivity and societal happiness that comes from breathing so much smog.
    - dirtyid 4y ago
      >temporary regression ... >China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global warming was not a concern Pretty much, security enviroment has changed. So indigenous energy security = short/medium term coal is back until electrification proliferates.
- anonym29 4y ago
  We do have a worse starting point, but as another commenter has pointed out, we're trending in the right direction and China is trending in the wrong direction. Part of the solution is necessarily going to be temporary reductions in American energy consumption, writ large, until we can produce technology to sustainably remove carbon emissions from the environment at scale. I'm all-in, for instance, on banning SUVs and "light" trucks for personal ownership, which categorically require more energy input (regardless of whether gasoline, hydrogen, electric, etc) than sedans and compact cars - to say nothing of the pedestrian safety risks, no less. Hell, I'm open to considering energy quotas for residential homes, to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold, to disincentive wasteful use of electricity. These are all tiny steps in the right direction, and all insufficient alone, but our progress in saving the climate is a vector value, not a boolean value. A bunch of little improvements in the right direction do help, but we cannot accept them as a "complete" solution on their own.
marcinzm 4y ago
Last I checked China, India, etc. still have a much lower per capita carbon footprint than the US.
- inkblotuniverse 4y ago
  They're looking to catch up! They don't want to remain poor, after all.
  - tzs 4y ago
    They don't need to come anywhere near US levels of per capita emissions to stop being poor. Here are some countries that are generally considered to be reasonably wealthy, and their per capita emissions as a percent of US per capita emissions: 63% Japan 61% Germany 36% UK 30% Switzerland India is at 12% now and China at 48%.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    They are just as much looking to leapfrog and have opportunities to do so. Without massive numbers of oil and coal lobbyists, as just one example, it is far easier for them to jump straight into massive renewable energy sources and skip a lot of Western CO2 mistakes in their "bootstrapping" processes.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Google says per capita is for each person. And there are a lot more persons in both India and China. Much lower isn't going to help for long.
jjoonathan 4y ago
The factories that make solar panels and wind turbines for us today will make solar panels and wind turbines for the rest of the world tomorrow, and also more factories in between now and then. > make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket" These drops in a bucket are exponential. What did your mother teach you about exponentials? > the way things are done in China not changing China is making solar panels and nuclear reactors like the future depends on it. They are part of the problem, yes, but they are definitely part of the solution too. > climate change cult Wanting clean air and tame climate is "cult" behavior?
- horns4lyfe 4y ago
  As far as the cult goes, I think they probably mean the “we have to tear down the economy and re build it to address climate Justice” and “any sacrifice is worth it in the name of climate change crowds”. Of which a large number just pay lip service, but there are still a lot of true believers.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    I would be much more sympathetic to these concerns if I saw credible green extremist policy pushes of the kind you describe, but the extent of green policy so far seems to be... EV subsidies for Elon Musk. No, right now green extremists are primarily just bogeymen invoked by the usual conservative causes. I just don't feel a pressing need to jump into this fight on the side of legacy energy. Not yet and probably not ever.
    - anonym29 4y ago
      This is precisely my criticism of that crowd. They aren't proposing real solutions, just "EVs everywhere!" while EVs are ostensibly not even a fully mature technology the way ICE's are yet.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    It's almost like solving this problem gets harder and harder the longer we put it off. If only we knew this was a looming problem 40 years ago and started doing something about it back then. The total economic cost would have been much lower. And the scary thing is, the cost of climate change is only going to get worse. Eventually we will reach a point where the cost is unavoidable, and we will be spending trillions dealing with the consequences rather than billions preventing them. There is a reason our own military pegs climate change as one of our biggest national security risks in the 21st century, because things are going to get very ugly when large populated regions of the world become inhospitable.
tzs 4y ago
For whatever upper limit we finally decide we must keep warming under there will be a corresponding total amount of greenhouse gases that can be in the atmosphere without pushing warming past that limit. Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide which countries are emitting too much and need to cut back and which countries are using less than their fair share and can still expand. One way to see this is to look at what happens when a country splits in two. With an unweighted comparison for determining shares any country that is using more than its share could split into smaller countries. The union of those smaller countries would still be emitting at least as much as before but it would move the finger to point at someone else. The sensible comparison is to weight by population, with adjustments for trade to account for countries outsourcing their emissions to others. India is around #130 in emissions per capita. Nigeria is around #170. They are both currently way below their fair share. If India and Nigeria as part of growing more wealthy needed to increase their emissions to the same level as Brazil, that could be offset by the US cutting emission by a mere 10%.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If you’re going to create a quota for countries, it’s not obvious that you should allow credits for outsourced emissions. If a country wants to use its previous quota on trade, it can but it gets no credit excusing it.
scythe 4y ago
>China has been infamous for decades for not even having reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naïvety, irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma demanding ideological conformance? IR spectroscopy from satellite data. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479720313487 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Was going to say... I would guess/hope that combining chemistry and meteorology would allow researchers to measure samples of air outside China's jurisdiction and come up with reasonable estimations of any emissions they are omitting.
avianlyric 4y ago
We’re already seeing countries decouple their economic growth from CO2 output (even after accounting for offshoring)[0]. Coupled with the fact that green technologies like wind and solar are either cheaper, or cost competitive with fossil sources of energy, plus the history of developing countries leap frogging up the tech tree (for example many African countries jumped straight to mobile banking). There’s absolutely no reason to believe that developing countries will cause anywhere near the same levels of environmental damage as western countries did during their development. Additionally, western countries could just pay developing to use greener tech, covering extra cost’s needed to build carbon neutral economies, given western nations have profited enormously from their exploitation of the natural environment. To believe that climate change is hopeless problem, and that solutions could not only be developed, but already exist, is pointlessly cynical and counterproductive. Rather than explain why we’re all doom, you could instead do some research and learn about the interesting work going on to solve the exact issues you mention. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
jmcqk6 4y ago
> I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc. Because we still all gotta share this earth together, and destroying it faster helps no one. How is that difficult to understand? Do you honestly think that just going "fuck it, let's keep polluting because other people are doing the same" is really going to get us to a better place?
bryanlarsen 4y ago
> nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run We've already reduced estimated warming from ~6 degrees to ~3.5 degrees or so. It's not enough, but it's a hell of a lot better than statistically insignificant.
trasz3 4y ago
And let me guess, you’re not even aware that green every in China - eg nuclear power plants - is growing much quicker than in US?
nicoburns 4y ago
Why would you think that China doesn't care about climate change? It's going to affect them too after all. Per-capita, the US is still by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

dimitrios1 4y ago

[flagged]

teg4n_ 4y ago
how does that have anything to do with the alt-right??
anonym29 4y ago
This is not what I am advocating for. To be unequivocally clear, I absolutely do believe in man-made climate change, and that the solution to it cannot be found down the path of ignoring it.
Pxtl 4y ago
How is "Accelerate the wealth generation in developing nations" an alt-right idea?
- altrigjtroll 4y ago
  [dead]

AlecSchueler 4y ago

This sort of ignores the global nature of our supply chains though. Someone can be very green in life here in the EU because all the products they buy are manufactured in China and their environmental impact is externalised and put onto the stats of another country that's trying to meet our demands. By regulating what's available on markets here we can pressure maufacturers elsewhere. What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.

anonym29 4y ago
I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from eloquent bitching, which I can certainly be fairly accused of. That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either. The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions.
- ireflect 4y ago
  You are a very good writer and I’m intrigued by this thread. Can you elaborate on what you see as actual solutions and how they would look (no matter how far fetched)?
  - anonym29 4y ago
    Thank you for the complement. I'm under no delusion that I have the solutions to the whole world's problems figured out. These ideas are like unrefined chunks of coal, rife with imperfections and riddled with flaws and only under the great pressure and heat of vigorous, critical debate may they ever hope to become diamonds. I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions? At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution. Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not. Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now. These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first. Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes. Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.

rootusrootus 4y ago

> This isn't a fight we can win The right doesn't even believe that climate change is real, they aren't participating in any fight.

anonym29 4y ago
Declaring your own countrymen an enemy in a war that countries five times our size is winning is not going to convince them to join your side.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Declaring your own countrymen an enemy This is historically more of a right-wing phenomenon in the US. Though I concede it is becoming stronger on the left in recent years, as their frustration boils over. Seems they've finally concluded that the right wing will never be coming to the table in good faith, so might as well fight fire with fire. We're all losing.
- TylerE 4y ago
  They're my enemy because they already declared me theirs.

nluken 4y ago

I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0 difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e. reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to do that regardless. Also don't dismiss that doing these things puts international pressure on developing nations to clean up their energy as demand increases. Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions until they do first. Reducing carbon domestically is necessary to try to reduce it abroad.

hammock 4y ago
>I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? We could compel China and other countries, by diplomatic and other means
- smoldesu 4y ago
  That sorta requires you to lead by example, first.
  - hammock 4y ago
    Does it? The US is currently compelling Russia to give up its claims in eastern Ukraine, despite occupying whole parts of Syria and other places itself
    - trasz3 4y ago
      US hasn’t invaded Syria in a colonial war. They also didn’t commit genocide in Syria.
      - hammock 4y ago
        Someone might want to tell the people of Syria. >"The Syrian Arab Republic affirms that the practices of the United States of America and the illegal presence of its forces on parts of the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic is an actual embodiment of the crime of aggression," the Syrian Mission to the United Nations told Newsweek. >"Syria stresses that the lies promoted by the U.S. administration are nothing but a failed attempt to justify the acts of aggression and the flagrant violation of the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic," https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-forever-war-1792298 https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-for...

dzader 4y ago

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anonym29 4y ago
Do you intend to refute any part of what I actually said, or just to engage in unproductive name-calling?
- dzader 4y ago
  [flagged]

solarkraft 4y ago

anonym29 4y ago
Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely asking China and India to get on board this century working so far? I'm not saying we shouldn't be taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint in the west, I'm saying that doing that and hoping that other countries will voluntarily join us isn't working.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >Is the strategy of doing it ourselves and politely asking China and India to get on board this century working so far? Yes. Western shifts to less-harmful methods and materials increases the size of the market for those methods and materials and lowers their costs, spurring adoption in places not as rich as the West. The early adoption of solar panels in the west drives production capacity in poorer nations that are more manufacturing-oriented. The increased production capacity increases supply, which lowers prices, which makes it more affordable for them to transition to solar (and other technologies). International conventions, treaties, and agreements headed by richer nations bring along poorer nations. In the US, harmful emissions like CO2 and GHG plateaued in the 70s and 80s and started declining on both a total and per-capita basis in the 2000s. They are still much, MUCH, higher than the rest of the world but are declining. In China and India emissions have started to slow their rate of increase or have plateaued in the last 10 years. China went from ~5% of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear in 2000 to 15% in 2019. The US was at approximately 40% in 2020. Given the rates of change China will probably surpass the United States in renewable/nuclear generation as a percentage of their electricity generation in 10-20 years. I would expect the emissions curves to mimic those of Europe and the United States, lagging by 30-40 years. This is a decades-long effort, not something that can be realized in years. The infrastructure built 20 years ago still has 30 years left in it, so the targets we want to hit in 50 years need to be planned for and built today. But as for your question "the strategy of doing it ourselves" isn't really valid. Each individual American emits roughly 3x the amount of CO2 that a Chinese person does. We're not "doing it ourselves" we are barely sacrificing anything while expecting people poorer than us to do what we don't want to do. https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Continents_percapita.png https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2022/PNG/s76_2022_Continen...

nemo44x 4y ago

We just need to convince all the people in poor and up and coming countries to stay poor.

babypuncher 4y ago

The ban on CFCs has been a huge success and likely prevented an awful lot of melanoma. It's a similar story with leaded gasoline. I'll never understand this argument. "Why should we care about our health if {insert poor country here} doesn't care about theirs"? It's just a convenient excuse to keep making the problem worse and worse. The correct solution here is to find the culprits and pressure them into complying with international goals, not just give up and turn the Earth into an inhospitable furnace.

Leary 4y ago

If you look at cumulative historical emissions, whether CO2 or HFCs, it is the West that produced the majority of the pollutants that is currently in the atmosphere. The west, therefore should bare the majority of the responsibility for their actions since they produced this tremendous externality when they were industrializing.

Gareth321 4y ago
It sounds like you're arguing we should be cool with China destroying the environment because some other countries already damaged it. Am I understanding your argument correctly?
ftrobro 4y ago
USA is the only western country in the top five for historical CO2 emissions since 1850 (unless you consider Brazil a western country): https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-historically-responsible-for-climate-change/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-his...

christkv 4y ago

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Pxtl 4y ago

Realistically, China is playing both sides here and everybody knows it. On the one hand, they know there's no real political consequence for polluting yet - they're happy to loot the commons as hard as they can. On the other hand, China is also investing a furious amount of money into green tech, doing multiple moonshots at a time on this stuff. So when the world does start to enforce standards globally, they'll be in the winning position. So in this era where nobody is putting in an earnest effort on climate change, they're winnning... and the day we switch over to caring and enforcing the rules globally, they'll keep on winning.

asperous 4y ago

We don't have to trust their numbers, we have satellites that can monitor the emission levels. The US pollutes at roughly twice the amount on a per person basis as China. In addition we "outsource" some of our pollution to them by them doing our manufacturing. It's tough to both raise the standard of living (reduce poverty) while also reducing pollution but China has a lot of initiatives to be more green; for examples 150 new nuclear reactors planned in the next 15 years. They benefit from the better air quality so it's a goal for them.

bluGill 4y ago
The trends are the US is reducing emissions. I'm not sure what China us doing (I know they build a lot of solar, but i'm not clear if they are also building coal power plants)
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  They are building, buying, and using a lot of coal, but that's mostly a temporary regression in their environmentalism from a significant economic reduction. Remember, at one point they were literally closing their airports because it's too smoggy to operate safely. China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global warming was not a concern, simply because they don't like the lost productivity and societal happiness that comes from breathing so much smog.
  - dirtyid 4y ago
    >temporary regression ... >China will reduce their fossil fuel usage even if global warming was not a concern Pretty much, security enviroment has changed. So indigenous energy security = short/medium term coal is back until electrification proliferates.
anonym29 4y ago
We do have a worse starting point, but as another commenter has pointed out, we're trending in the right direction and China is trending in the wrong direction. Part of the solution is necessarily going to be temporary reductions in American energy consumption, writ large, until we can produce technology to sustainably remove carbon emissions from the environment at scale. I'm all-in, for instance, on banning SUVs and "light" trucks for personal ownership, which categorically require more energy input (regardless of whether gasoline, hydrogen, electric, etc) than sedans and compact cars - to say nothing of the pedestrian safety risks, no less. Hell, I'm open to considering energy quotas for residential homes, to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold, to disincentive wasteful use of electricity. These are all tiny steps in the right direction, and all insufficient alone, but our progress in saving the climate is a vector value, not a boolean value. A bunch of little improvements in the right direction do help, but we cannot accept them as a "complete" solution on their own.

marcinzm 4y ago

Last I checked China, India, etc. still have a much lower per capita carbon footprint than the US.

inkblotuniverse 4y ago
They're looking to catch up! They don't want to remain poor, after all.
- tzs 4y ago
  They don't need to come anywhere near US levels of per capita emissions to stop being poor. Here are some countries that are generally considered to be reasonably wealthy, and their per capita emissions as a percent of US per capita emissions: 63% Japan 61% Germany 36% UK 30% Switzerland India is at 12% now and China at 48%.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  They are just as much looking to leapfrog and have opportunities to do so. Without massive numbers of oil and coal lobbyists, as just one example, it is far easier for them to jump straight into massive renewable energy sources and skip a lot of Western CO2 mistakes in their "bootstrapping" processes.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Google says per capita is for each person. And there are a lot more persons in both India and China. Much lower isn't going to help for long.

jjoonathan 4y ago

The factories that make solar panels and wind turbines for us today will make solar panels and wind turbines for the rest of the world tomorrow, and also more factories in between now and then. > make even a proverbial "drop in the bucket" These drops in a bucket are exponential. What did your mother teach you about exponentials? > the way things are done in China not changing China is making solar panels and nuclear reactors like the future depends on it. They are part of the problem, yes, but they are definitely part of the solution too. > climate change cult Wanting clean air and tame climate is "cult" behavior?

horns4lyfe 4y ago
As far as the cult goes, I think they probably mean the “we have to tear down the economy and re build it to address climate Justice” and “any sacrifice is worth it in the name of climate change crowds”. Of which a large number just pay lip service, but there are still a lot of true believers.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  I would be much more sympathetic to these concerns if I saw credible green extremist policy pushes of the kind you describe, but the extent of green policy so far seems to be... EV subsidies for Elon Musk. No, right now green extremists are primarily just bogeymen invoked by the usual conservative causes. I just don't feel a pressing need to jump into this fight on the side of legacy energy. Not yet and probably not ever.
  - anonym29 4y ago
    This is precisely my criticism of that crowd. They aren't proposing real solutions, just "EVs everywhere!" while EVs are ostensibly not even a fully mature technology the way ICE's are yet.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  It's almost like solving this problem gets harder and harder the longer we put it off. If only we knew this was a looming problem 40 years ago and started doing something about it back then. The total economic cost would have been much lower. And the scary thing is, the cost of climate change is only going to get worse. Eventually we will reach a point where the cost is unavoidable, and we will be spending trillions dealing with the consequences rather than billions preventing them. There is a reason our own military pegs climate change as one of our biggest national security risks in the 21st century, because things are going to get very ugly when large populated regions of the world become inhospitable.

tzs 4y ago

For whatever upper limit we finally decide we must keep warming under there will be a corresponding total amount of greenhouse gases that can be in the atmosphere without pushing warming past that limit. Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide which countries are emitting too much and need to cut back and which countries are using less than their fair share and can still expand. One way to see this is to look at what happens when a country splits in two. With an unweighted comparison for determining shares any country that is using more than its share could split into smaller countries. The union of those smaller countries would still be emitting at least as much as before but it would move the finger to point at someone else. The sensible comparison is to weight by population, with adjustments for trade to account for countries outsourcing their emissions to others. India is around #130 in emissions per capita. Nigeria is around #170. They are both currently way below their fair share. If India and Nigeria as part of growing more wealthy needed to increase their emissions to the same level as Brazil, that could be offset by the US cutting emission by a mere 10%.

sokoloff 4y ago
If you’re going to create a quota for countries, it’s not obvious that you should allow credits for outsourced emissions. If a country wants to use its previous quota on trade, it can but it gets no credit excusing it.

scythe 4y ago

>China has been infamous for decades for not even having reliable currency data, what on earth makes us think they're even collecting (let alone honestly sharing) reliable data on CO2, let alone HFCs and CFCs, beyond willful naïvety, irrational optimism, and quasi-religious climate dogma demanding ideological conformance? IR spectroscopy from satellite data. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479720313487 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Was going to say... I would guess/hope that combining chemistry and meteorology would allow researchers to measure samples of air outside China's jurisdiction and come up with reasonable estimations of any emissions they are omitting.

avianlyric 4y ago

We’re already seeing countries decouple their economic growth from CO2 output (even after accounting for offshoring)[0]. Coupled with the fact that green technologies like wind and solar are either cheaper, or cost competitive with fossil sources of energy, plus the history of developing countries leap frogging up the tech tree (for example many African countries jumped straight to mobile banking). There’s absolutely no reason to believe that developing countries will cause anywhere near the same levels of environmental damage as western countries did during their development. Additionally, western countries could just pay developing to use greener tech, covering extra cost’s needed to build carbon neutral economies, given western nations have profited enormously from their exploitation of the natural environment. To believe that climate change is hopeless problem, and that solutions could not only be developed, but already exist, is pointlessly cynical and counterproductive. Rather than explain why we’re all doom, you could instead do some research and learn about the interesting work going on to solve the exact issues you mention. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling

jmcqk6 4y ago

> I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 energy production, cheap air conditioning, etc. Because we still all gotta share this earth together, and destroying it faster helps no one. How is that difficult to understand? Do you honestly think that just going "fuck it, let's keep polluting because other people are doing the same" is really going to get us to a better place?

bryanlarsen 4y ago

> nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run We've already reduced estimated warming from ~6 degrees to ~3.5 degrees or so. It's not enough, but it's a hell of a lot better than statistically insignificant.

trasz3 4y ago

And let me guess, you’re not even aware that green every in China - eg nuclear power plants - is growing much quicker than in US?

nicoburns 4y ago

Why would you think that China doesn't care about climate change? It's going to affect them too after all. Per-capita, the US is still by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.