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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

>China and India will not play ball.

That is a lame excuse, mostly used by people from developed countries that are responsible for the issue, so you dodge responsibility and also try to put blame on the developing country why you are continuing screwing the environment. It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too (I am thinking especially at coal plants and cars that have effects locally too, so cleaning yup your house means you will have healthier population and less CO2)

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> It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too

This is a poor metaphor. It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle, explaining to your neighbor why it's bad, and then your neighbor saying "well, your grandpa beat the shit out of your dad, so we get to beat our kids too!"

And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China.

The US is the largest historical emitter of co2. Meaning that the US is still responsible for the largest share of excess co2 in the atmosphere. If co2 emissions are a race then the US has slowed and China is now running faster, but the US lapped china 3 times before China started gaining on them.

Additionally the idea that deploying new technologies equates to economic self harm is absurd. The price per kilowatt hour of renewable energy has been dropping continuously for decades in a pattern similar to moores law. Soon renewable energy will be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it will be similar to what the discovery of crude oil deposits did to the whale oil industry. Betting on fossil fuels from an economic perspective is stupid as hell in 2022 and risking the survival of worldwide ecosystems and society on that bet is literally the stupidest thing I can think of people advocating for.

China is a problem. We absolutely need China to reduce their emissions much more aggressively than they are. Instead of using them as an excuse to sleepwalk humanity towards potential catastrophe we should be reducing our own emissions so as to have a legitimate position from which to argue about what China should be doing while using our significant economic leverage to incentivize China to reduce their emissions.

I thought it was pretty well understood by now that given that manufacturing of goods destined for the US is happening in China or SE Asia, that there's effectively a miscount.

It's not like china is sitting there burning coal for no reason. And all those ships are going to ports in the US and the like.

Of course this is all a shared responsibility, but let's not act like all of those "CO2 emissions by country" calculations are not extremely fudged by how consumption, manufacturing, and recycling happen in various parts of the world.

This is a poor metaphor. A lot of the CO2 is for producing stuff for the western world. So your neighbor is saying: If I don't beat my kids, they won't come over to you and do slave work, and you'll have to beat your own kids again.

Or we can just agree that this metaphor doesn't work.

>And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China

Only if you ignore per capita and history.

A better analogy, Someone was selling meat, 50% horse and 5-% rabbit , he was using q horse at 1 rabbit ratio, this are your stats , bullshit.

>It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle

Except you are trying not to stop the cyucle and finding s shitty excuse, I will continue poisoning this city with coal related toxic waste because China has even worse pollution. I should continue throwing plastic garbage in the river and kill our river life because the neighboring country/cities does the same.

My phrasing likely could have been more clear. China and India cannot curtail emissions without reducing energy availability and increasing costs to their population. This has direct and immediate impact on quality of life and human development within their borders. It is actually rather hypocritical for the developed world, which has benefitted from years of development on the back of low cost energy, to push for emissions reductions from countries that have decades of development to undergo.

To be clear, there are intermediate actions they could and should take, such as phase out of coal in favor of natural gas.

Quite frankly a lot of people in India and China don't even have the resources to generate emissions.

ACs, Refrigerators, and cars are still unavailable to the lower middle class. Even the middle class can only have 2 out of those 3.

A large chunk of public transport in the big cities in India and China is CNG and electric.

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