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> and the goal from the other countries perspective is to throttle the US. Like the Paris Accords. Which is not inherently a bad thing: https://en.wikipedia.or

• etiennebausson 1y ago
  Interesting dataset. It would be a lot fairer to display tons of CO2 per inhabitant I think. And that's before taking into account imported CO2.
  • brooke2k 1y ago
    Climate change isn't driven by per-inhabitant CO2 emissions. It's driven by total CO2 emissions, of which the US outputs 12% per year.
    • tock 1y ago
      Climate change isn't driven by human defined borders either. It's driven by total CO2 emissions. If a per-capita rate is non sensical then border based emissions are even more non sensical. Greenland only emits 0.001% of the total. Greenland is 12000x a better country than the US wow. This is exactly why per-capita is used.
      • im3w1l 1y ago
        Yeah and this is clearest when you consider federations. Imagine if you count the US as 50 separate countries, suddenly they are much more climate friendly! That's of course absurd.
      • mulmen 1y ago
        Climate change isn’t driven by borders but energy policy is defined within them.
        • tock 1y ago
          And no policy is gonna willingly reduce energy consumption which is directly co-related with QOL when other countries have much higher per-capita consumption. Politically humans need fairness.
          • mulmen 1y ago
            We don’t need to reduce energy consumption. We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
            • tock 1y ago
              We know. There are many reasons why countries choose more polluting sources of energy. Part of which is costs. The world runs on incentives. Maybe rich countries like the US can subsidize clean energy for poorer countries like India. Because consumption is definitely not going to come down.
              • immibis 1y ago
                Solar energy is currently the cheapest form of energy, cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas. You know the conspiracy theories about how the oil companies are keeping perpetual motion machines hidden? Solar panels are literally that. With the caveat that they only work in sunlight. So they're not great when you need energy at night. But even if you triple your costs to account for only working 8 hours a day, they're cheaper than anything else.
                • reliabilityguy 1y ago
                  > Solar energy is currently the cheapest form of energy, cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas. Cheaper before the incentives?
                  • mulmen 1y ago
                    Yes. Even if you count the fossil fuel subsidies.
    • hansvm 1y ago
      But the reason emissions happen is for per-inhabitant benefits. It's a very reasonable idea [0] to set a per-inhabitant goal and criticize countries exceeding that threshold (which the US would still fail at, but I'm arguing against the metric itself rather than US faults). Take your position to something of an extreme -- the Vatican could open up 200 coal power plants for its holy Bitcoin operations and still be sufficiently less impactful to CO2 than the US that nobody would target them during climate talks. Rephrased from the other direction, each US citizen would blow their CO2 budget by buying a shirt per decade to get down to the Vatican's levels. That's a common mental failure mode, analogous to the sorites paradox. Countries are made up of many small actors and decisions, and pretending otherwise is unlikely to help you achieve your goals. [0] Mostly -- transitive effects like one country generating all the goods another country uses are harder to account for. Assuming we could measure perfectly though...
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • Spooky23 1y ago
        In context of the United States, there are a small number of actors that stand to lose billions to renewables. I live in the Northeast. Solar reduced my grid demand by 40%. That translates to a full recoup of the investment in 60-65 months with subsidy, 100-110 without. The unsubsidized payback period is 1/3 of the projected useful life of the panels. You know it’s a good idea because opponents big argument is safety of rooftop installers and future workers disposing of solar panels, topics that these folks DNGAF about in the least.
    • jandrewrogers 1y ago
      12% is quite low considering that the US is responsible for >20% of global industrial output.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • gruez 1y ago
        Not really, by that metric Europe still comes out ahead. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
        • jandrewrogers 1y ago
          Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology. Europe has a relatively high carbon footprint per unit of output for things like animal husbandry compared to the US, they just don't do enough of it for it to add up.
          • gruez 1y ago
            >Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology. This also works in reverse, eg. US importing goods from china and therefore not being on the hook for emissions generated by those goods. ourworldindata has another page that compares the difference between consumption based emissions and territorial emissions[1]. Looking at that page, consumption based emissions are 11% higher for the US vs 27% for the EU. That makes the US look better, but it's not enough to cancel out the fact that the US is 63% more carbon intensive than the EU. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
    • nonethewiser 1y ago
      You're kinda contradicting yourself. You're right that it's about absolute numbers. But then you use a percentage. perhaps 12% for 5% of the global population is too high. But you dont want to relate it to population. Relating to number of countries is rather non-sensical. Some are big (by productivity, area, population, etc.), some are tiny.
      • brooke2k 1y ago
        Making it relative to countries is useful because that is the delination along which policy is made. Making it relative to people, IMO, only serves to obscure the fact that the US/China/etc are by far the biggest producers of emissions. Writing climate policy with them in mind makes more sense than pushing for somewhere like Monaco to reduce emissions, even if their emissions per person are high.
  • nosianu 1y ago
    How is that fair when a lot of industrial production was shifted to one region of the globe specifically? It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports. Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result. Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end. That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
    • gruez 1y ago
      >It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports. >Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762344 No, it's pretty straightforward. Count where a given good is consumed rather then where it's produced. It has to be estimated, but that's also the case for territorial emissions or other economic figures like GDP, but we don't throw our hands up and say "well it's too hard and too prone to fudging so we might as well not bother". >Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end. What "feedback loops" are you talking about? >That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global. Ok but surely you must recognize that the US, where the average person drives a pickup/SUV to work is emitting more carbon than something like India where the average person gets around by walking or using motorbikes? That's the concept that conversations like "US emits more carbon per capita" are trying to capture. "The systems are global" sounds like an excuse to continue driving a F-150 to work because of some spurious arguments about how hard it's do to do carbon accounting 100% accurately.
  • gruez 1y ago
    >And that's before taking into account imported CO2. It doesn't really make much of a difference. For US specifically there's about a 10% difference. https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
  • mulmen 1y ago
    I believe the concept you are looking for is scope 3 emissions.
  • rishav_sharan 1y ago
    Something like this? 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...
• jppope 1y ago
  Super weird that they don't factor in productivity at all. Don't take me the wrong way I hate the fact that the United States thinks the only way to do anything is to burn fossil fuels, but that doesn't change the fact that our output per capita has got to be 10x the countries we are being compared against in this article.
  • exitb 1y ago
    In what sense? Does an American bolt factory produce 10x as much bots per worker, or is the American bolt just 10x more expensive?
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • dollylambda 1y ago
      I think in the sense that if you look at the ratio of say GDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...) to CO2 emission, you could get _a_ metric of efficiency. The product produced vs the emissions produced.
      • jobigoud 1y ago
        GDP doesn't differentiate between good and bad things and for climate change it would be border line circular because natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are "good" for the GDP (reconstruction effort is a net positive, destruction itself is not subtracted).
      • twothreeone 1y ago
        That perspective also helps to understand the position that any call for radical climate action must be a weaponization of competing economies to weaken the leader of the pack. So it is very bad framing. Do the work cheaper, better, and at scale. By doing it more efficiently you win. Oh, and of course you'll be more innovative too.
      • 1y ago
• nonethewiser 1y ago
  But think about it from the perspective of a US that wants to reduce carbon emissions. Why not simply throttle carbon emissions directly?
  • burningChrome 1y ago
    The US has been? - U.S. greenhouse gas emissions peaked around 2007, then declined by roughly 18% from that peak. - 1990–2022: Emissions fell about 3% compared to 1990 levels, despite population and GDP growth. - 2005 Benchmark: Emissions in 2022 were 17% below 2005 levels, largely due to cleaner electricity generation and efficiency improvements. - Transportation: Consistently the largest source, accounting for ~30–35% of CO₂ emissions. - Electric Power: Significant reductions—down 41% since 2005—due to coal-to-natural-gas shift and renewables growth. - 2024: Energy-related CO₂ emissions totaled 4,772 million metric tons, down from 4,940 MMt in 2022. - 2022: Total U.S. GHG emissions were 6,343 million metric tons CO₂e, or 5,489 MMt after land-sector sequestration
  • M95D 1y ago
    Because it doesn't work. We (all) need to cut fossil fuel extraction. Once it gets extracted, there is absolutely no way it will not be burned.
• tgma 1y ago
  A good thing from whose perspective? From the perspective of US it would always be a bad thing. Why would you ever want to concede something and limit yourself without proportional concessions.
  • deadbabe 1y ago
    To grow “soft power”. Especially by agreeing to things you probably would have done anyway.
    • renewiltord 1y ago
      Soft power isn't a thing. As people have recently pointed out with the USAID situation: helping someone and then stopping the help is far worse than not helping at all. Therefore, soft power isn't power, it's actually more like soft debt. Every time you do charity, you add on to your moral obligations. The less charity you do, the fewer the requirements on you.
      • mystraline 1y ago
        Please. Do you really honestly believe that the USAID spent $5M a year telling Sri Lankan journalists how to use non-gendered language? That was a front for US-lead initiatives in a moderately opposing country. It was to funnel funds to destabilize what the USA didnt like. And to be fair, good. The USA rested on its laurels for too long. Bout time they have to face the democracy they 'spread' is just fascism.
        • renewiltord 1y ago
          Certainly, and in fact no soft power operation can be distinguished from something like this (because a front would deliberately be disguised as a soft-power operation) which renders soft-power operations useless to develop soft-power. And when it is removed, one can either reasonably conclude that the underlying operation is no longer necessary or one could react with how it's worse that they took away something they promised. In no case will anyone ever say "Well, I am not happy it is gone but I am grateful for all the work they put in to help out of a desire to be good guys" so soft power isn't a thing. To be clear, I have no quarrel with you on the belief that they're fronts. I only mean that they do not develop power of any sort.