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Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissio
by nroets 3y ago
Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.
- thriftwy 3y agoEurope has tons of cars and air travel that is cheaper and more plentiful than that of US.
- nroets 3y agoEurope may have many cars, but they are smaller and drive shorter distance. Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.
- thriftwy 3y agoYes, that was golden when US mandated larger, more powerful cars with the cover up of green regulations. Do not disagree here.
- dv_dt 3y agoWhat? Europe has tons of mass transit and walkable cities.
- thriftwy 3y agoDespite this, they also have a huge length of high speed highways with cars going back and forth. The topology is not much different than in the US. Difference is there, but it's quantitative and will not in any way prevent climate change, especially as it also relies on infrastructure that US does not have and will take a huge carbon footprint to build.
- dv_dt 3y agoThey also have huge lengths of high speed and regional rail. The difference shows up in the energy per capita numbers. Nothing prevents climate change unless we get more intentional and scaled investments in renewable energy and circular green economies.
- thriftwy 3y agoThat rail would be nice to have, but it will not yield a decisive difference on the global warming time frame (~20 years). You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.
- dv_dt 3y agoThis is just a misleading thought framework of discounting any single item as a “decisive” silver bullet. Of course none of them are being talked about as being a silver bullet. We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.
- throwaway290 3y agoThere is much poverty in China outside of major cities and near nonexistent safety net in all regards. This is a country where a sizable chunk of population lives on less than 6 USD per day (not enough to bribe the doctor to get "universal" healthcare in case of something serious) and where the gov has recently made posting videos of poor people on social media punishable as "against national interest". You also should be aware about the amount of coal power plants it runs and keeps building (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal-production-to-tackle-power-shortage-11634727835 https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...). It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.
- nroets 3y agoIn China, the life expectancy already exceeded that of the US. They don't need to spend more on healthcare!
- throwaway290 3y agoFirst, why are you bringing up US? Many would agree that US healthcare is shit. But I suspect it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw, so we can only guess if life expectancy on paper is better than in reality...