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This observation goes to the heart of why nobody is really listening to the climate change crowd. Most of the emissions were in the last 30 years and due to cat
by roenxi 3y ago
This observation goes to the heart of why nobody is really listening to the climate change crowd. Most of the emissions were in the last 30 years and due to catapulting China out of poverty (and work in progress catapaulting India) [0]. There is a similarly frustrating dynamic to the anti-nuclear-power debate (which we have to pin our hopes on China also barrelling through). People get all riled up about the costs of something that is making the world so much better that the cost should be paid.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
- bilsbie 3y agoNot sure why you were downvoted.
- NavinF 3y agoA lot of people seem to downvote facts that they don't like
- yareal 3y ago"Most co2 emissions from the past thirty years are from china" is just not a fact
- NavinF 3y agoWhy use quotation marks if you're gonna change his words? "and due to catapulting China out of poverty (and work in progress catapaulting India)" is obviously true and obviously a good thing
- albumen 3y agoOr perhaps the argument is more complicated than the OP suggests. Perhaps you and they should watch the Kurzgesagt video made in conjunction with Our World in Data (linked on OP's linked page): https://youtu.be/ipVxxxqwBQw?si=OtBDyuU-RbTRbete https://youtu.be/ipVxxxqwBQw?si=OtBDyuU-RbTRbete
- readthenotes1 3y agoI'm not sure why you're downvoted for stating the obvious. Another huge contribution to the rise of course is Asia outside of China. One only needs to see the pictures from Delhi to understand what's going on with those numbers (or try to take a car close to the Taj Mahal). Iirc, China has pledged to be carbon neutral from 2030 through 2050, so they're doing what any sensible country would do and emitting as much as they can until 2030.
- yareal 3y agoThe down votes are because it's not a thoughtful interpretation. Chinas population is whole integer multiples of the US population. And the while the growth is important, so is the area under the curve. The U.S. has been pumping out emissions the whole time, while China is just now reaching the same total output.
- roenxi 3y agoPer-capita numbers are irrelevant if we're interested in outcomes. Chemistry doesn't stop and calculate the population responsible for a chemical emission before reacting. History is also irrelevant for that matter, given that the past cannot be changed and has little bearing on the present or future of this issue.
- yareal 3y agoThat's nonsense. Per person efficiency is critical. China is more efficient than the U.S. in co2, we should learn from that. We need efficiency and a total reduction.
- roenxi 3y agoIf you get 50% more efficient in pollution/person in the US (which is already hard to see happening), total pollution will continue to increase as more people globally become wealthy. And, if they did become 50% more efficient, that doesn't change the eventual amount of pollution - it just doubles the time taken to get there. We'd still burn through all the available fossil fuels over the course of about 2 centuries so it is still all going to end up in the atmosphere. Per-capita efficiency isn't going to do anything. At least not anything that the climate-change crowd will like. Efficiency is a welcome thing for its own sake.
- Hikikomori 3y agoWhile China is going up and US slowly going down, the US does not look very good per capita or cumulative (4% of the world's population with 25% of total emissions cumulative). What would it look like if manufacturing and transport of goods were added to the destined country? Edit: what you said isn't even true according to your own graph. Both US and China emitted roughly 200B tons since 1990.