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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).

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).