Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know who he thinks the "we" is in this article. Several countries are already using ~100% carbon-neutral electricity and the USA and Europe are progressing rapidly. The main culprits are developing nations and China, so it's "them" who should be doing something urgently and "they" have a whole slew of other problems not covered by Gates' US-centric perspective.

Reasonable approaches would be to bring manufacturing back to countries that use mostly clean energy (oh, and modern approaches to labor and human rights) and to tax imports from developing countries with poor CO2 record heavily until they fix their issues.

View on HN

How much of the China's footprint is generated for manufacturing stuff for the developed nations?

We may have 100% clean energy locally only because we've outsourced the dirty one.

> We may have 100% clean energy locally only because we've outsourced the dirty one.

We have outsourced it because they have been undercutting local producers in pollution, labor, human rights standards. Therefore bringing back manufacturing and taxing them is a much better solution overall than bringing more extreme measures to our already pretty "green" region.

Wicked consumers! Doubtless Chinese factory workers will find alternative employment in the fields should the need arise.

You could not be further from the truth. Carbon emissions per capita is way higher in the US and in Europe than in China and India.

China, 7.5 metric tons per person in 2014. Switzerland, 4.3. Sweden, 4.5. France, 4.6. Spain, 5.0. Italy, 5.3. UK, 6.5.

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

Cherry-picking data much?

That same article lists the EU overall at 8.6 and US at 17.

Not sure if you were trying to make a point about China having a greater output than European contries but you missed the USA: 16.5 (metric tons per capita).

AFAIK a fair part of China's emissions are due to the production of goods not bought by Chinese but by Swiss, French, Spanish... nationals. China "decides" to produce, so this country is somewhat "guilty", but let's not neglect its "accomplices".

Good point. Have an upvote.

It's more complicated than that. Emissions in the US, Canada and some European countries are higher (per capita) while some other countries like the UK, Italy, Spain and France are below China. The EU as a whole ranks a bit below China on a per captia basis.

However the other important factor here is the trend line. Most western countries above China in this ranking has a trend line pointing downwards, while China still has a trend line pointing upwards. So if both China and the US continue on their current paths then China will indeed soon surpass the US.

isn't it even more complicated than that?

It would seem that manufacturing would have a significant impact on the figures and a lot of manufacturing has been outsourced to China/India.

So how much of all the stuff that is bought and consumed in the EU/USA is actually produced in China or India?

You are downvoted for apparant racism.

The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China which has 1.2B people.

> apparant racism.

By people who apparently don't even know the meaning of the word.

> The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China which has 1.2B people.

The western world has a much larger population, but I'd like to see you back that claim up with reproducible numbers.

It's a fact that CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly (per capita and absolutely) while the "western world" is mostly reducing them and has been doing that for many years. Also, we have to rely on China's "official data", which may or may not be correct.

> It's a fact that CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly (per capita and absolutely) while the "western world" is mostly reducing them and has been doing that for many years.

If it's a fact you should be able to cite a source?

> Also, we have to rely on China's "official data", which may or may not be correct.

The rest of the world is more than capable of monitoring China's emissions using satellite data.

> CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly

China rapidly tripled their emissions from 2000 to 2010, but after 2011 they have hardly increased at all.

Second graph here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-chinas-co2-emissions-...

> Now let us return to why the reported Chinese CO2 emissions growth in the communique is so much lower than our projection in the 2018 Global Carbon Budget. The real reason is not clear, but the problem is an unexplained inconsistency in the coal statistics in the communique. [...] >There is no apparent explanation for these discrepancies. Some people have suggested that China’s statistics bureau is manipulating the data to make coal consumption growth look smoother than it actually is, although there is no direct evidence for this. Whatever the case, the discrepancy over coal means that overall CO2 growth could be as high as around 4% – compared to 2.3% reported in the communique – even before accounting for other sources of uncertainty that we usually include in our analyses. Those factors push the uncertainty range even wider, to -0.4% to +6.7%. ...

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

Report dated 30 Nov 2018

"China is positioning itself as a global climate leader, and its actions have an enormous impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. Discouragingly, a rise in coal consumption drove Chinese CO2 emissions to a new high in 2017, which will likely be exceeded again in 2018."

European Union: 6.4 tCO2 per capita per year

China: 7.5

And EU is about 500 million people.

Source: 2014 numbers from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pc

All that stuff the EU and US buys - where's it made?

It counts toward China's emissions total. Whilst having reduced EU or US contribution comparatively speaking. We globalised manufacturing emissions, and most of them ended up in China.

The simple fact is no one can claim their halo - everyone, everywhere has a part in the solution, and we can find failings to criticise everywhere too.

Maybe Orkney got closest to their get out of jail card, but they're tiny.

> All that stuff the EU and US buys - where's it made?

Not that I disagree, but it is not just Europeans' choice to buy from China, but also Chineses' choice not to sell.

The western world, of about 500 million people

How did you get to that number? EU is about 500 million people, The US and Canada is about 350, Add in any other countries you might consider 'western' and that's another 50-100 million.

So what's the right approach here? Could there be a BDS-like movement on things created with dirty energy?

If there was a "made with renewable energy" certification on products, I'd certainly consider paying a premium and even being inconvenienced into finding them.

Maybe even a version of the better world shopper (https://betterworldshopper.org/) which does exclusively energy grades and then have forward-thinking grocery stores start to to put the grade on the label.

I'd certainly shop at a store with that system at every conceivable opportunity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com