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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain what's going on in America's western regions? My very naïve understanding is these places have giant deserts the size of some countries, shouldn't they be tripping over solar farms and have much lower carbon intensity?

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They went full retard on politics and decided climate change isn't a thing. Or if it is, it is someone else's problem. "Look at the huge emissions of China and India - nevermind the CO2/Capita numbers that makes us the bad guy".

CO2/capita numbers matter from an assigning blame point of view, but physics doesn't care if a ton of CO2 is emitted by one person or ten people.

It's a bad argument to do nothing, but it's also not completely wrong. At this point we could turn off Europe and the USA and would still blow past 800ppm CO2 by 2100.

Would it work that way? A non-trivial portion of the emissions of those countries are caused by manufacturing products that are exported to the US and Europe

It would have some follow-on effect for a while due to shrinking the global economy but over time domestic demand in these countries and other places would pick up the slack.

But they can't pickup the slack if they are turned off. The east should not take the blame for emissions, when the majority of it is the proxy emission for the western consumption.

I meant the East would scale up consumption. The Chinese want cars and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners too, and I’m pretty bullish on air conditioning in India.

I think we overestimate how much is proxy emissions even now. Those are whole modern growing societies not just factories for us. Our view of climate change and carbon emission tends to be, like other things, very Euro-and-US centric and provincial.

What I’m saying is that if you turned us off you’d only delay the oncoming train, not stop it.

It's somewhat live, change it to monthly.

Also, cheap gas.

I think the chart doesn't show progress. California carbon fuel is mostly natural gas and those other states still burn a lot of coal. But much less than they used to 10 years ago. California started with a lower carbon intensity and pushed early on to move to renewables. But the other states are also moving that direction, just later and starting with high carbon footprint.

Probably helps California politically that 90% of it's natural gas is imported. vs locally produced coal. But Texas as reactionary conservative as it is isn't dragging it's feet either. (We hate that woke solar and wind. Enough to not make some money? Now you shut your mouth)

Worth noting inland western states are small population wise.

The right seems fairly interested in "space lasers" so perhaps if we just reframe solar to "space laser power" it'll help with acceptance? Very much tongue in cheek, however this has worked before. There's a company that collects old refrigerant that people have stored (mostly on farms and at mechanic shops). They specifically don't advertise it as recycling or a "green" initiative and instead promote it as a way to make some extra cash. There was a podcast about it a few years ago. I think it was this one https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/kwhnz8b

Call it "large scale gravitationally confined fusion power," which is 100% accurate.

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