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I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world. After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and
by pentae 3y ago
I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world.
After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists.
Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that.
The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth
- freen 3y agoPersonal responsibility for environmental issues is a fiction peddled by the biggest polluters. The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.
- thomasahle 3y ago"But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial. The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".
- rayiner 3y agoWhat does “per capita” emissions have to do with the physics of climate change?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thomasahle 3y agoIt's related to the comment I was replying to: > Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing. The commenter appears to say that people in western countries are already doing a good job on climate. Even though those people emit way more than people from other countries.
- concordDance 3y agoThe Chinese emit more per capita than the Europeans.
- seasox 3y agoYes, if you count the emissions for the stuff manufactured in China for (not only) european customers. If you look at consumption-based emissions[0], China is at 7 t per capita, which is 8 t less than the US, 2 t less than Germany and about par with Denmark, Slovakia, and England. 0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
- tptacek 3y agoThis is per capita data again, which makes the argument circular. In absolute terms, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the next producer, and only a small fraction of that is exported.
- zpeti 3y agoThank you. Climate change is a diplomacy issue, nothing the west is going to do in the next 50 years will make a difference with what’s going on in china and elsewhere. So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology. But guilt tripping the west and stopping people eating steak will. Not. Make. A. Difference.
- SpacePortKnight 3y agoUSA emits almost 8 times more C02 when compared to India per capita. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita In that sense India would need to be 10B+ people to poluate as much as US / west does.
- pentae 3y agoAgain these studies don't take into account things like burning, air pollution, waterways pollution, nor trees per capita in India vs North America. If you've got enough trees per person to offset their carbon use, then it doesn't matter how much co2 they emit.
- zpeti 3y agoExcept per capita co2 emissions AND total emissions have been falling in the USA. China now emits more co2 than europe and USA combined. And this is NOT because of exports to the west, those are now also falling yet co2 emissions are still climbing. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=USA~CHN~IND https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-... This is what I mean. Just these two countries like india and china are emitting so much CO2, that any reduction in emissions by the west by not eating steak just won't matter. Either you stop china doing this (good luck!) or think of another solution.
- 21echoes 3y agoYou can wax poetic all you want about anecdotal values differences between the first and third worlds, but speaking in terms of actual practical impact: what you are saying is simply not true. Greenhouse gas emissions scale super-linearly with income: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1 https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte... There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Agency isn't good enough for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+income&source=lmns&bih=859&biw=1512&client=firefox-b-1-d&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiiqP64vKCBAxXGBkQIHcVCDAUQ0pQJKAB6BAgBEAI https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+... OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash
- pentae 3y agoYeah and my point is that these studies look at energy consumption they don’t take into account things like burning yard waste or plastic garbage into their co2 consumption which is often done daily to keep mosquitoes away and from laziness. Nor does it look at air pollution nor waterways pollution. So it’s a useless metric that doesn’t even have accurate data or tell the real story. What will we do when these societies who give no fucks about the environment (compared to the west) get wealthier? White guilt is not going to save anyone
- Hypocritelefty 3y ago[dead]
- refulgentis 3y agoI don't think proposing cutting CO2 emissions is "white guilt" -- I probably missed something, I'm not sure how race entered it. (and I don't mean that snarky! I probably missed it :) ) I'm also unsure if "White guilt" is a good descriptor for the West enforcing emission cuts by force on not-West: that sounds like aggression as opposed to an expression of guilt. The fun/exciting part: a total mind-bender on this is not-West countries are installing renewables at scale without incentives or "[any color] guilt", solar is cheaper than any other supply you can think of. Then we can start talking about "solar isn't enough because unreliable", true. Then maybe we start talking about how it's racist to prevent people from having unreliable electricity, true, but rest-assured, the idea of enforcing cuts on other nations isn't on the table. To avoid the tarpit of moralizing, I try to stay focused on saying "they're installing solar panels and it's cool if they gotta do coal/tires/etc. while we 10x batteries again like we did last decade" --- this also has the benefit of matching the uncoordinated reality as it stands
- EatingWithForks 3y agoI think it's actually more complicated, because a lot of the construction, etc. is caused by demand from the western countries. Also, western countries consume proportionately more flights, cars, electronics... pretty much all the actual major industry-sized consumption is disproportionately consumed by the west, even if a portion of individual westerners (certainly not all) are eco-conscious, no-waste, plastic-free vegans.
- rambojohnson 3y agothe point is that if it's that vs. the oceans consuming continents, it's probably not that big a deal BY COMPARISON. stop virtue signaling.
- Hypocritelefty 3y ago[dead]
- andrewjl 3y agoWhat's incredible is missing the fact that CO2 emissions and most kinds of pollution in general are verifiably multiples higher per individual in the West compared to elsewhere. We're just better at keeping them out of sight and apparently out of mind, too.