9 ms·

I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.

by gnarlouse 1y ago

kulahan 1y ago
Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.
- munk-a 1y ago
  The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    > It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic. It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences. Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002). Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
    - PeaceTed 1y ago
      Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
  - votepaunchy 1y ago
    > embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
    - rtpg 1y ago
      There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list. My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints. Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
      - xethos 1y ago
        > a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity). > it's hard to make the whole thing profitable Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
        rtpg 1y ago
        > This is presumably intentional It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something? > Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is" Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere". It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out. And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market! I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
- porknaut 1y ago
  It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
    China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
  - tzs 1y ago
    China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting. Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be. (This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
    - enraged_camel 1y ago
      >> China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting. For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
    - throwaway6734 1y ago
      > If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better). Why?
- jaza 1y ago
  I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.
- ebbi 1y ago
  Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well. The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
  - JBiserkov 1y ago
    I mean, just the nukes alone are incomprehensible, adding all the conventional munitions ... I'm out of words. A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY 1 second = 1 month
    - LMYahooTFY 1y ago
      All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be statistically detectable. IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint, cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is probably significantly less than .1% There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
  - cman1444 1y ago
    ...do nuclear bombs release significant amounts of CO2? I didn't think they did.
    - selcuka 1y ago
      Not the detonation itself (if we don't count the fires it may cause), but the total CO2 cost of nukes is high [1]: > A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide… It’s the infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all contribute. > A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of CO2 to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. This is more than the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom. [1] https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-of-nukes-and-war/ https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-o...
- gorwell 1y ago
  For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints 1. China 26.16% 2 United States 11.53% 3. India 7.69% 4. Russia 3.75% 5. Brazil 3.16% 6. Indonesia 3.15% 7. Japan 2.15% 8. Iran 2.06% 9. Saudi Arabia 1.60% 10. Canada 1.54% The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.
  - moefh 1y ago
    That's not great context: China and India have huge populations, it's expected that they should be at the top. Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
    - gorwell 1y ago
      Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume. Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large. Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
    - free652 1y ago
      Why? I would expect China to be at the top since it's #1 manufacturing country? But India is like behind Germany at (5). How about GDP per emission? And that would make China way higher than US. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
  - 1y ago
- refurb 1y ago
  You can’t look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a result of the production of something, often production which improves the state of human suffering. What is more important is efficiency. Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller” That’s an insane statement
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output. Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world. The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    What do you mean by "output"? If you compare emissions/export volume, then the US is behind lots of European countries, like Germany (or even Italy). Comparisons with the Netherlands (heavy agriculture) or Norway (big oil producer) are looking really bad, too: US is around 15 (tons CO2/capita/year), while China is at 8, Europe at 6ish and India at ~2. The only countries I would classify as "surprisingly low" is France (at 4.5, thanks to massive past investments into electrification and nuclear energy) as well as India (at 2, mainly a result of low industrialization, and likely to rise sharply). US + Canada is doing quite badly at CO2 emissions, even compared to wealthier nations like Luxembourg or Switzerland (!!). While part of it may be low population density, that is not the full story either (compare Norway).
Waterluvian 1y ago
It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.
- porknaut 1y ago
  What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution. Glad they are trying to do good things though.
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
    - mdeeks 1y ago
      This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total and cumulative matters the most. China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling. The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
      - rtpg 1y ago
        In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad. If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions? In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions. Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
nine_zeros 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DSingularity 1y ago
[flagged]
- gnarlouse 1y ago
  This is a purely ecological/existential conversation. Of course the US has a horrible track record of policing the globe in its own interest. But if you want to wage selfish wars, you’d think you’d enforce policies that make sure there’s a tomorrow to be conquered.
mc32 1y ago
During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.
adrianmonk 1y ago
Who is "we"?
- gnarlouse 1y ago
  The US. Admittedly, it’s a kneejerk reaction.
TheRealNGenius 1y ago
[dead]
switchbak 1y ago
Ahem: "China consumes over half of the world’s coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion." But trees are nice. Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918 https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918
- lvturner 1y ago
  Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.
  - switchbak 1y ago
    The Op said: "we're the baddies" when discussing an article about China, implying that we (whoever that is) are worse than China because they added lots of trees. That's a clear and obvious nod to the "are we the baddies" skit about a couple Nazi soldiers slowly realizing they're the bad guys. It's also very fashionable in this moment to self-flagellate beyond any reasonable level. I'm saying: perhaps we shouldn't be giving that country such acclaims when in addition to adding lots of trees, they're also burning an absolutely colossal amount of carbon just with their coal use alone. Two things can be true at the same time, and we can be even handed in our appraisals. Your take is uncharitable and inaccurate.
- ehsankia 1y ago
  is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Are you trying to say something like perfect is the enemy of good?
thesmtsolver 1y ago
Great quality comment. We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar... https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577 > The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." > And, according to studies, that is true. > The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
- z2 1y ago
  Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and furniture for export. It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area despite being similar in size to the US.
- deadfoxygrandpa 1y ago
  well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert
reissbaker 1y ago
Based on forest cover? The US has nearly 50% more forest cover than China, and has been steadily growing it since the 90s as well.
raincole 1y ago
Who the hell are 'we'? The US? The western countries? By the "forest baddies index", South America is the baddies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/media/File:1990-_Average_annual_forest_area_net_change,_globally,_and_by_region_and_decade.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/me...
k4rli 1y ago
100% true. The US defaultism "we" is a cherry on top.

I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.

kulahan 1y ago

Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.

munk-a 1y ago
The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  > It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic. It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences. Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002). Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
  - PeaceTed 1y ago
    Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
- votepaunchy 1y ago
  > embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
  - rtpg 1y ago
    There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list. My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints. Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
    - xethos 1y ago
      > a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity). > it's hard to make the whole thing profitable Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
      - rtpg 1y ago
        > This is presumably intentional It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something? > Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is" Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere". It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out. And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market! I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
porknaut 1y ago
It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
  China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
- tzs 1y ago
  China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting. Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be. (This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
  - enraged_camel 1y ago
    >> China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting. For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
  - throwaway6734 1y ago
    > If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better). Why?
jaza 1y ago
I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.
ebbi 1y ago
Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well. The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
- JBiserkov 1y ago
  I mean, just the nukes alone are incomprehensible, adding all the conventional munitions ... I'm out of words. A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY 1 second = 1 month
  - LMYahooTFY 1y ago
    All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be statistically detectable. IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint, cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is probably significantly less than .1% There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
- cman1444 1y ago
  ...do nuclear bombs release significant amounts of CO2? I didn't think they did.
  - selcuka 1y ago
    Not the detonation itself (if we don't count the fires it may cause), but the total CO2 cost of nukes is high [1]: > A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide… It’s the infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all contribute. > A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of CO2 to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. This is more than the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom. [1] https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-of-nukes-and-war/ https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-o...
gorwell 1y ago
For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints 1. China 26.16% 2 United States 11.53% 3. India 7.69% 4. Russia 3.75% 5. Brazil 3.16% 6. Indonesia 3.15% 7. Japan 2.15% 8. Iran 2.06% 9. Saudi Arabia 1.60% 10. Canada 1.54% The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.
- moefh 1y ago
  That's not great context: China and India have huge populations, it's expected that they should be at the top. Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
  - gorwell 1y ago
    Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume. Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large. Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
  - free652 1y ago
    Why? I would expect China to be at the top since it's #1 manufacturing country? But India is like behind Germany at (5). How about GDP per emission? And that would make China way higher than US. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
- 1y ago
refurb 1y ago
You can’t look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a result of the production of something, often production which improves the state of human suffering. What is more important is efficiency. Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller” That’s an insane statement
jandrewrogers 1y ago
How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output. Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world. The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  What do you mean by "output"? If you compare emissions/export volume, then the US is behind lots of European countries, like Germany (or even Italy). Comparisons with the Netherlands (heavy agriculture) or Norway (big oil producer) are looking really bad, too: US is around 15 (tons CO2/capita/year), while China is at 8, Europe at 6ish and India at ~2. The only countries I would classify as "surprisingly low" is France (at 4.5, thanks to massive past investments into electrification and nuclear energy) as well as India (at 2, mainly a result of low industrialization, and likely to rise sharply). US + Canada is doing quite badly at CO2 emissions, even compared to wealthier nations like Luxembourg or Switzerland (!!). While part of it may be low population density, that is not the full story either (compare Norway).

Waterluvian 1y ago

It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.

porknaut 1y ago
What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution. Glad they are trying to do good things though.
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
  - mdeeks 1y ago
    This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total and cumulative matters the most. China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling. The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
    - rtpg 1y ago
      In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad. If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions? In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions. Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.

nine_zeros 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

DSingularity 1y ago

[flagged]

gnarlouse 1y ago
This is a purely ecological/existential conversation. Of course the US has a horrible track record of policing the globe in its own interest. But if you want to wage selfish wars, you’d think you’d enforce policies that make sure there’s a tomorrow to be conquered.

mc32 1y ago

During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.

adrianmonk 1y ago

Who is "we"?

gnarlouse 1y ago
The US. Admittedly, it’s a kneejerk reaction.

TheRealNGenius 1y ago

[dead]

switchbak 1y ago

Ahem: "China consumes over half of the world’s coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion." But trees are nice. Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918 https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918

lvturner 1y ago
Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.
- switchbak 1y ago
  The Op said: "we're the baddies" when discussing an article about China, implying that we (whoever that is) are worse than China because they added lots of trees. That's a clear and obvious nod to the "are we the baddies" skit about a couple Nazi soldiers slowly realizing they're the bad guys. It's also very fashionable in this moment to self-flagellate beyond any reasonable level. I'm saying: perhaps we shouldn't be giving that country such acclaims when in addition to adding lots of trees, they're also burning an absolutely colossal amount of carbon just with their coal use alone. Two things can be true at the same time, and we can be even handed in our appraisals. Your take is uncharitable and inaccurate.
ehsankia 1y ago
is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Are you trying to say something like perfect is the enemy of good?

thesmtsolver 1y ago

Great quality comment. We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar... https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577 > The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." > And, according to studies, that is true. > The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.

z2 1y ago
Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and furniture for export. It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area despite being similar in size to the US.
deadfoxygrandpa 1y ago
well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert

reissbaker 1y ago

Based on forest cover? The US has nearly 50% more forest cover than China, and has been steadily growing it since the 90s as well.

raincole 1y ago

Who the hell are 'we'? The US? The western countries? By the "forest baddies index", South America is the baddies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/media/File:1990-_Average_annual_forest_area_net_change,_globally,_and_by_region_and_decade.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/me...

k4rli 1y ago

100% true. The US defaultism "we" is a cherry on top.