Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry, but this is complete bunkum. Europe has spent spent decades dealing with major cross-border pollution issues. Sulphur emitted by British and German coal power plants was destroying Polish forests until those emissions were curbed by international agreements. Rivers across the continent were running green with algae because of eutrophication caused by fertiliser run-off and discharges of untreated sewage. There are still major issues with cross-border emissions of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.

There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.

China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...

You should be sorry. China's pork industry alone generates over a billion tonnes of waste per year, accounts for about half of the nitrogen and over 90% of the phosphorus waste put into the South China Sea, is a major portion of world methane pollution and may well be the single largest vector of antibiotic resistant bacteria the world has ever seen. And that's just one industry.

Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".

The environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry. Due to the shift towards feedlot production, it has been getting dirtier in most respects over recent decades. Antibiotic use as a growth promoter is still legal and ubiquitous in the US.

America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.

China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.

http://www.sustainabletable.org/906/waste-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

> he environmental impacts of the US beef industry are in the same ballpark as the Chinese pork industry.

The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cd.live/uploads/content_image/conte...

> America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China.

Again, from the standpoint of the environment, there is no extra credit for being absurdly overpopulated.

China emits more CO2 than the US, the EU and Russia combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

So if China were to split into 10 different countries it would somehow become an acceptable level?

Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.

I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.

If those covered 10 times as much of the earth in similarly temperate regions, I would be inclined to say yes.

> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.

Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?

In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.

The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.

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