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America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

(www.theatlantic.com)
150 points pmags | 2 comments | 10 Apr 25 12:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mathieuh ◴[10 Apr 25 13:16 UTC] No.43643464[source]▶
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?
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1. energy123 ◴[10 Apr 25 13:34 UTC] No.43643619[source]▶
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.

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2. Whoppertime ◴[12 Apr 25 20:47 UTC] No.43667826[source]▶
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.