For every ton of CO2 that the west has reduced in the past decade China has produced three tons of CO2.[1]
We need another breakthrough on the scale of the Haber process.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=OWID_WRL~Hi...
This is a really bad statement.
Reason 3:
This year China installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined [1]. In China, 50% of new cars are electric. Their per/person emissions is much less than USA. Meanwhile, we are putting up tariffs on Chinese EVs, etc.
Instead of blaming them, realise that they are taking climate change seriously and we are not.
Reason 2:
Look at your graph, ‘we’ have like 15% reduction in CO2. You could divide by any growing economy and the result is the same, because we suck at ‘our job’.
Reason 1;
Lastly, we outsourced our emissions by moving production to China and then importing the products. That’s not much of achievement.
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...
I agree if you opine that the high income countries won't adequately do it, and the low/middle income countries have bigger problems, but it is a choice (and mainly our choice, if I'm not mistaken about HN's predominant NA+EU demographic)
I'm not sure most high-income people (globally speaking, so like the richest ~billion) are consciously making that choice, or at minimum aren't aware of the cost-benefit situation. Pretending there is no choice doesn't seem like the right way to go about this, considering that every euro spent on prevention significantly outweighs adaptation options
But I don't think societies elites (the highest educated portion of the population) has taken the same perspective. I think they've instead chosen to approach humanity (themselves excepted of course) as evil, greedy stupid and belligerent and have taken a hostile attitude to most human and human endeavours (especially commercial ones)
Wanting to do something about climate change is great. Salivating over human suffering or insulting or looking down on people outside of your elite circle for not doing or caring more...
Whatever it is I think it's an even bigger problem than climate change. The rhetoric of the climate movement is disturbing. We can't progress as a species when a large portion of a our species hates us, looks down on us, and wants thd worst for us
When did the climate change movement become the anti human movement? is this just a politically correct way of attacking poor and less educated people
China's annual CO2 emmissions have been exponentially increasing for the last 50 years and are currently nearly three times as high as the US's and continuing to exponentially increase. There has been zero decrease in emissions over the last 50 years, only increase.
The US's annual CO2 emissions have been linearly decreasing every year for the last 20 years and is now a third of China's.
How is your conclusion to this that China is taking it seriously and the US isn't? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
But the tech is there just not the political will or finances as it hurts economies and people's chances of winning elections.
China is likely to hit it's peak oil because of ev's and peak coal in the next 2-3 years because of renewables and batteries. Although China is mostly going electric for economic and energy security reasons it will be interesting to see what happens when it is no longer using carbon based energy for it's growth.
If you reduce your consumption the cost of oil will fall towards the cost of production and middle/low income countries would consume it.
The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.
US/Canada/Australia have the worlds highest emissions per capita, except oil states like Kuwait. They have no moral high ground to lecture anyone about climate change.
If you disagree that we should consider population size when we compare emissions, I am open to that idea.
In that case we can make similarly absurd comparisons, between USA and Slovakia.
It is only thanks to China that we have affordable batteries and solar panels at all. And without China there would be no hope of green energy transition whatsoever
Maybe they'll do decades-long investments to set up new oil infrastructure after we've moved away from it, but even then: it isn't a 1:1 exchange. What we reduce doesn't simply pop back up elsewhere because, evidenced by our moving away in this scenario, there's economical alternatives. Even if it came back 100% in another country a few decades later, buying time really does help us here because we can take more and more preventative and adaptative measures. It won't prevent any and all issues, but a +3°C world in 2200 is still vastly better (and more predictable) than a +5°C world from accelerated oil use
Rather than buying and re-burying oil, you're probably getting a higher ROI (lower climate change adaptation costs) by spending those euros (that you'd otherwise spend on burying oil) on helping everyone (including oneself) not produce greenhouse gasses
This is needlessly roundabout (especially considering that the oil starts buried). One could simply scale down production (by regulation).