6 ms·

It sounds like you only care about problems that affect you very directly, which is pretty short-sighted. There are many climate-related problems that are affec

by kaitai 3y ago

It sounds like you only care about problems that affect you very directly, which is pretty short-sighted. There are many climate-related problems that are affecting people already in Central America (no rain, can't farm, so they're walking north), the northern US and California (wildfires and wildfire smoke), the Midwest (aquifers depleted, rendering farmland less valuable), Florida (sinkholes from aquifer depletion, flooding in streets, no they can't just build a dike). It's a pretty multi-factorial problem and it's unfortunate that the interpretation here seems to be pretty simplistic. Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.

jackmott42 3y ago
Nobody is going to give up their F150 and Corvette if they don't believe there is anything wrong with burning fossil fuels.
- kaitai 3y ago
  Unless they get better acceleration and lower cost of ownership + a cool factor.
efitz 3y ago
I have a finite amount of attention, resources and energy. I'm fortunate to have more than most. But climate change is not even in my top 10 problems. Preparing for retirement, getting my kid educated, caring for ill family members, supporting my local food bank, keeping my government from going authoritarian - these are where I spend my resources. If I had more I'd probably spend them on things that literally kill millions of people per year like malaria, typhoid, infant mortality, etc.
- tinyplanet-o 3y ago
  [dead]
safety1st 3y ago
Along these lines, if there's one place where the left and the right in the US have an easy opportunity to cooperate and yet for some reason don't, it's on Chinese emissions. China's responsible for almost a third of all the CO2 emissions in the world, and they have some of the dirtiest industry on the planet [1]. They got their own relaxed version of the Paris Accords and haven't even been meeting those standards. You don't really see anyone dinging them for any of this though. Now the left really dislikes emissions and the right simply dislikes China. So you'd think there would be an incentive for them to cooperate on this issue but they don't. I think it underscores how so much of politics is basically secular religion now and really about identifying with your tribe, like the issue on the left is probably that they don't want to admit a lot of this climate problem is someone else's fault, and the issue on the right is they don't want to admit there's a problem in the first place. [1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/
- dirtyid 3y ago
  There isn't because geopolitics of US pushing blame based on total instead of per capita emissions (nevermind historical) would make US look retarded - the left doesn't want that taint. Since it's not going to fly internationally, which limits it to domestic politics, and basing domestic politics of changing a geopolitical rivals largely functions as political theatre.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Just to clarify, China is at ~8T per capita [1]. USA is at 14T [2]. Rhodium group [3] says it was 10.1T and 17.6 in 2019 so it seems like the numbers have quite a bit of variability. I do think that OP has a good point that we do probably need to consider totals since the environment doesn't care about per capita. It's also important to consider that China's energy use is probably dominated by industry supporting manufacturing for the entire world, so that "per capita" number is fairly inflated vs the true number. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states [3] https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-countries/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20China's%20per%20capita,world%20at%2017.6%20tons%2Fcapita https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-....

by kaitai 3y ago

jackmott42 3y ago

Nobody is going to give up their F150 and Corvette if they don't believe there is anything wrong with burning fossil fuels.

kaitai 3y ago
Unless they get better acceleration and lower cost of ownership + a cool factor.

efitz 3y ago

I have a finite amount of attention, resources and energy. I'm fortunate to have more than most. But climate change is not even in my top 10 problems. Preparing for retirement, getting my kid educated, caring for ill family members, supporting my local food bank, keeping my government from going authoritarian - these are where I spend my resources. If I had more I'd probably spend them on things that literally kill millions of people per year like malaria, typhoid, infant mortality, etc.

tinyplanet-o 3y ago
[dead]

safety1st 3y ago

Along these lines, if there's one place where the left and the right in the US have an easy opportunity to cooperate and yet for some reason don't, it's on Chinese emissions. China's responsible for almost a third of all the CO2 emissions in the world, and they have some of the dirtiest industry on the planet [1]. They got their own relaxed version of the Paris Accords and haven't even been meeting those standards. You don't really see anyone dinging them for any of this though. Now the left really dislikes emissions and the right simply dislikes China. So you'd think there would be an incentive for them to cooperate on this issue but they don't. I think it underscores how so much of politics is basically secular religion now and really about identifying with your tribe, like the issue on the left is probably that they don't want to admit a lot of this climate problem is someone else's fault, and the issue on the right is they don't want to admit there's a problem in the first place. [1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

dirtyid 3y ago
There isn't because geopolitics of US pushing blame based on total instead of per capita emissions (nevermind historical) would make US look retarded - the left doesn't want that taint. Since it's not going to fly internationally, which limits it to domestic politics, and basing domestic politics of changing a geopolitical rivals largely functions as political theatre.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Just to clarify, China is at ~8T per capita [1]. USA is at 14T [2]. Rhodium group [3] says it was 10.1T and 17.6 in 2019 so it seems like the numbers have quite a bit of variability. I do think that OP has a good point that we do probably need to consider totals since the environment doesn't care about per capita. It's also important to consider that China's energy use is probably dominated by industry supporting manufacturing for the entire world, so that "per capita" number is fairly inflated vs the true number. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states [3] https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-countries/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20China's%20per%20capita,world%20at%2017.6%20tons%2Fcapita https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-....