America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China". In reality doing things more cleanly can make a huge difference to your local environment. Do you want to live right next to a coal-fired power plant just because that's what they do in China? Do you want to walk past roads clogged with dirty, polluting cars?

China has outlined plans to reduce their environmental impact in their 5-year plan. One can say "wow do you really trust the CCP?" but at least they have a publicly available plan.

https://en.ndrc.gov.cn/policies/202303/P02023042539857072035...

That's lying with statistics. They arrived at their conclusion and then cherry picked a metric that supports it.

Per-capita emissions is the only metric that has any meaning, since it isn't altered by historical happenstance as to whether a country is large or was split into multiple countries due to historical events.

If China split into two countries tomorrow, suddenly they would be doing better on this deceitful metric but the ground truth has not changed one bit.

Trump started calling coal "beautiful clean coal". At this point I think he could convince his followers that the sky is red and no one would bat an eye.

> One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China".

1. Implement a mechanism domestically to reduce pollution. [1][2]

2. Then implement a "carbon/pollution tariff" on any imports[3] so that foreigners are hit the same way domestics folks are (perhaps with allowances for developing companies that are too poor for advanced pollution control).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Canada_Air_Quality_Agreem...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...

It's really wild. I'm not sure if people have just reached a level of fatigue with the lies -- they say after so many lies peoples brains just shut down discernment of truth.. He leverages this very well.

In absence of truth, its just trolling and abuse. I think for some of the followers, this is what they really want. They have lives devoid of meaning and subjectivity as they are long numb, and so watching someone troll / hurt others (including them at times) helps them feel anything.

There are people who would answer yes to both of those questions and then proceed to spout all manner of bullshit about it being harmless.

That's my biggest peave wrt climate change...

Why do they keep trying the doomsday messaging?

Its too far into the future, hence irrelevant for most current consumers. And even if they thought it relevant, if you take it at face value: whatever you're doing won't solve the issue anyway, because it's a global issue.

The messaging has to go back to local effects. Literally everything you should do for the climate has a lot of positive effects short term... I e. don't try to outlaw ICE vehicles in cities because of climate... Massively tax them because the they reduce the air quality and cause noise pollution

Per capita emissions is effected by population, and historical events that influence that capita being measured, like the Covid 19 outbreak. If you have 100,000 people living in a town emitting 100,000 tons of emissions and 10% of the population died due to happenstance, epidemiological or otherwise so you now have 90,000 people emitting 100,000 tons of emissions and the per capita rate went up despite no change in their production method or the amount of emissions they are producing.