U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%

The US, like most democracies, is worse at long term planning. It needs robust incentives to counteract short term instincts.

A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

People say that but the underlying assumption seems to be planning for the long-term at the nation state level is a good idea.

Given how chaotic the world is, I’m not sure that is true or if so just how true it is.

Democracies are inherently more chaotic than Communist dictatorships because of their very nature - democracies don’t tend to aim for stability, because stability brings about some good things but some bad things like lack of innovation and reduced competing, though I am not saying those are aspects of China per se, just speaking generally.

If we were to speak about China we could bring up a few long term planning failures. 3 stand out in my mind: the One Child Policy, the mass killing and starvation of Chinese people under Mao which set China back decades never mind the suffering, and more recently perhaps over-construction and the resulting ghost cities and unused infrastructure.

We could point to American short term thinking problems too but we are broadly familiar with those.

All that is to say, there’s a lot of either fear mongering or propaganda, not sure which. “China is long term oriented better watch out!” Is the current media phenomenon but nobody seems to really look at their long term planning failures or ask whether such long term planning is even good or successful.

Though one area China has been great at for long term planning is making sure their kids aren’t addicted to TikTok like ours.

China's CCP do party politics we'd have trouble to distinguish from failed democracies. They kinda fight with each other within the party, then the local CCP members vote on which delegates to send to the central committee equivalent (the NPC), and those 3000 delegates basically vote on country officials (which ultimately decides the political orientation). You also have weird political games between provincial politics and the pressure they put on delegates, and the pressure national officials put on provincial politics.

All in all, China can't be reduced to 'a dictatorship'. It's an oligarchy for sure (90 millions vote, less than 1% of the population) but it has too much political life to be reduced to that.

90 million is around 10% not 1%.