What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution.
This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total and cumulative matters the most.
China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling.
The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007.
Per capita most definitely matters. Every human is equal, there is no reason why one human has the right to emit much more than another. If we go by your reasoning, then all developing countries should figure out how to raise living standards without consuming more resources so the Americans don’t have to reduce theirs.
You are incorrect that China isn’t doing anything to lower its impact. It’s emissions would be much much much worse for the standard of living increases it achieved without investments in clean energy and EVs, tech that it is exporting abroad to the benefit of the world and to the dismay of America’s petro dollar dependence.
With such thinking, I now get why the rest of the world is beginning to hate America so much.
I didn't say China isn't doing anything. They are rolling out a mind boggling amount of clean energy right now. More than any other country by far. It's honestly incredible scale. It unfortunately isn't keeping up with their emissions though. The data is from 2023. It's very possible that in the last two years China has been able to stabilize emission growth.
I actually disagree a bit on the first part. I think developing countries have a right to have higher per capita emissions as they raise their standard of living and economy where they can get to the point of widely adopting clean energy.
I visited Beijing in April and it was much cleaner than it was before, electric vehicles everywhere, but people were also much richer, before a car was some sort of luxury and now it was just something you could get if you could find a place to park it. It’s hard to describe.
The o the thing to consider is that China isn’t really a full on consumption economy yet, that they develop a lot of infrastructure and make a lot of stuff for export, all that would be counted in per capita emissions even if it wasn’t to the benefit of a per capita member. The infrastructure building is going to slow down someday (like it did in Japan), China should seriously consider its exports next (especially rare earth refining which is really dirty and resource intensive).
> Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would sudenly be negliable?
Don't you see the argument goes both ways? If the US merge with a few Africa countries, does it count as an "improvement" in regard of carbon emission?
In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad.
If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions.
Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
>If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due to importing timber from rest of the world illegally.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested."
And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
I'm not talking about China's position, but thinking about texture of the emissions reductions in the rest of the world.
It's probably fairly unknowable what percent of emissions are for products that will be exported back out from China, but I think it's reasonable to say that when I buy some random wooden table from China and import it into Australia (for example), that I am at least somewhat responsible for those emissions, even if per-country emissions data doesn't reflect that!
I don't think this is some free pass for Chinese ecological behavior overall. My general hypothesis has been that at least some part of emissions reductions in the US and Europe are due to outsourcing. I just don't know how much of it is that.
That’s a really great point. Maybe their emission curve is what matters. It’s the measure of if they are investing enough into reducing emissions despite their production needs.
The thing is it's not _their_ production needs if they are the factory of the world.
If the US put a 1000% tariff on Chinese goods tomorrow, emissions in China would likely go down a decent amount, right? But is that an indicator of their production needs? Or the US's consumption patterns?
Not that this is some bilateral thing, there's a lot of people buying a lot of stuff from many places. Just thinking about a very simple example, and how I would like to see quantification on this front, but I don't know how doable it really is.
Theres going to be a very entertaining set of mental gymnastics people will start doing once China's emissions growth peaks and starts falling compared to the US. They're building a lot of renewables, a lot of nuclear plants and are very obviously tooling up to replicate fusion from whoever nails it.
Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel industry and cancelling renewable projects.
They aren't just building "a lot" of renewables and nuclear, they are building an absolutely mind boggling amount of it. Last year it was more than the rest of the world combined!
Who cares about mental gymnastics. It's a win for literally everyone and I hope you ca see it that way instead. Competition is good. It drives others to keep up.
Despite what the current US govt wants, the economics of solar and other renewables will drive it. Worst they can do is slow it down a bit.
China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be.
(This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
Assigning blame and guilt is pointless. Just look at how well it has worked to motivate the US to change. That is to say, not at all.
The only thing moving the needle is renewables and nuclear generating power more cheaply than fossil fuels, so it becomes stupid to not switch to them even if you have no regard for the long term health of the environment.
Per capita emissions give us a better idea of which groups of people require the largest change in their lifestyle in order to hit net zero. The current numbers suggest that the typical person in the US will have to do a lot more to hit net-zero than the typical person in China. Obviously, you can do better and estimate per capita emissions for each province/state/city or by wealth level. For instance, in many poor countries, most of their emissions come from the top 5-10% of the population. Everyone else emits basically nothing.
On the other hand, the total emissions of a country, absent other information, has little actionable value. It can only be uses to assign blame, so quite useless.
That still sounds like assigning blame and a vague call to "change lifestyle", instead of concrete action plans for energy, manufacturing, transportation and agricultural sectors. That is where the bulk of emissions are, not some billionaire's yacht or private jet.
> If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
A huge portion of China's emissions come from making things for people that aren't in China. The argument is that if a Chinese factory makes only widgets used in the US, those emissions from the Chinese factory are probably more accurately counted as US emissions.
Its like saying that you are 0 emissions because you have an electric car with no tailpipe while ignoring where the electricity is coming from.
The counter argument is that they'd have mass unemployment and would be in poverty without it. Virtually all rapid modern industrialization is reliant on exporting to foreign markets so characteizing it as American emissions is largely a misomer as it is really global emissions.
You're not actually addressing the accounting question though. The argument isn't about the economic benefits or consequences of manufacturing, it's simply about where we assign the carbon emissions in an accounting system.
Whether Chinese workers benefit economically from manufacturing exports doesn't change the fact that when a US consumer buys a product made in China, we could reasonably count those manufacturing emissions as US consumption-based emissions rather than Chinese production-based emissions.
This is really a question of "but for" causation: but for US consumer demand for these products, would these specific manufacturing emissions have occurred? If the answer is no, then there's a strong case for counting them as US emissions regardless of where the factory happens to be located.
Your point about global emissions sidesteps the question entirely. Of course all emissions are ultimately global in their climate impact, but for policy and measurement purposes we still need accounting frameworks. The question is whether production-based or consumption-based accounting gives us a more accurate picture for policy decisions.
The unemployment and poverty argument, while valid for other discussions, doesn't really bear on which accounting method better reflects responsibility for emissions.
While I fundamentally disagree, do you really not see how that would then mean all Chinese emissions are therefore a result of the United States? So that's... worse?
What? No, because China is also exporting to other markets. The counterfactual is that we don't do global industrialization and let the global poor remain poor.
The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
We can't claim we rose them from poverty while also denying culpability for the consequences thereof...
Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
>The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
Who is "We" here? I am speaking from a global perspective. Chinese industrialization has internal agency, drivers and motivation, the US did not force China to industrialize. Secondly Global Demand is not US-Specific, Europe, Japan and other markets contributed with their own agreements so the claim that the US is "responsible" is overstated here.
>Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
That's not what anyone serious is saying because it's just splitting hairs. Everyone buys from China, the US accounts for 15% of China's total imports so clearly their role here is exaggerated again. China also consumes much of their own manufacturing, while the US also exports many services elsewhere, so should US emissions be counted in other countries? And then there are also structural dynamics in how surplus economies intentionally suppress their demand to run surpluses.
In a world of comparative advantage, I don't see the particular value in performing funny calculations to divy up moral blame according to shifting trade dynamics, just much easier to point it out as shared global responsiblity in the path for Modernity.
>> China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
It's funny this myth persists, primarily in conservative circles, it seems. We are far worse per capita than China. In 2023, the US emitted 13.83 tons of carbon per capita. In that same year, China emitted 9.24 tons per capita. There are few countries that are worse than us - that list includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Who defines what “better” is? You’re a collection of atoms put together by a meaningless evolutionary process. In that sense, “better” is purely your preference not some objective truth. And in this case, some people prefer to kill and eat animals.
We're the universe trying to learn about itself. We have the duty to be best ones we can be. Agree that on the cosmic timescale it's meaningless. On the individual level it's not.
That’s just anthropomorphizing the universe, which cannot learn or think and therefore cannot impute meaning. It is simply your opinion that something has meaning on an individual level. It may to you, but it’s purely subjective.
How do you know that universe is not a giant computing device?
Or you know everything there is about infinity, other universes, how and where where "the playground" is placed (what's beyond its borders), what's the origin/meaning of life and so on?
Everything is meaningless and therefore we can do what we like? Even if it has no meaning to you, are you sure (deep down) it has no meaning for the lives you're taking (with your food choices)?
It's hard to find a successful pyramid scheme or bubble that I'm not upset I wasn't on the ground floor of. I'm also upset that I didn't win the lottery. It doesn't mean that I secretly think pyramid schemes, lotteries, and beanie babies are good, and that I'm naysaying them because I didn't get a piece. I would naysay them 10x as much if they had made me rich. I'd be rich and an authoritative source, who's going to stop me from talking shit about the things I dislike?
Roe vs Wade upended precedent before it, so precedent alone is a bad argument. The majority ruling specifically rebutted what it thought were nonsensical arguments in the Roe decision for tying the right to privacy to some inherent right in the constitution. Neither right should be viewed as constitutional and even if the right to privacy were, tying abortion to it is a fantastical leap of logic.
Yes, Roe did create a new right. But in creating that right it didn't take anything from anyone else, at least any living person. It took away the government's right to interfere with one aspect of an individuals life. This new ruling strips an existing right from the individual and returns it to the government. Only law students would see symmetry such a thing. People are allowed to be mad that today they are less in control of their lives than they were yesterday. They are allowed to be mad at government finding yet method to regulate their lives.
(I'm also a little shocked that the anti-big-government crowd isn't also screaming mad about this. All those rights they think they still have are also now on the table.)
> the anti-big-government crowd isn't also screaming mad
We anti-big-government crowd types are hopeful that the right to privacy that was invented by the supreme court in 1973 and revoked by the supreme court in 2022 will be added via the correct, non-reversible legislative process it ought to have been back then.
Not sure if you're right or wrong, but either way - far from destroying democracy, that is democracy in action. If the majority wants abortion, we get abortion. If the majority doesn't, we don't.
But the United States can hardly be called a democracy with gerrymandering, unelected federal judges, unequal representation for populous states in congress, and the electoral college.
The majority does want abortion rights, but those rights aren't coming. That's not democracy in action.
So you're expecting the government to solve a problem created by the government? That seems rather unwise, especially since in the interim you are losing rights as time goes on.
Especially when people are cheering on the side that's removing said rights because people would ban abortion, same-sex marriage etc no matter the cost.
I'm very confused about how people can square the two ideological positions of 'small government' and 'anti-abortion'. Roe v Wade explicitly barred the government and the states from interfering with a private individuals decision. The overturning of said decision empowers the government and increases their power.
People should be very afraid of decisions like these which take away rights from people.
Every case where a woman/doctor was charged for actions in relation to illegal abortion. And every time those convictions were affirmed by lower courts.
Otherwise anytime a law is passed, we’d consider it “overturning precedent”.
Precedent means that there is a long string of legal jurisprudence on a subject. Obviously roe/griswold created a new one, but it didn’t overturn/upend an existing one.
Glad they are trying to do good things though.