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Comment by __rito__ | Hacker News Reader

I did not possibly make my arguments clear.

China has higher emission, because China has higher number of factories. The factories produce stuff. Where do all that stuff go? And for whom are all that stuff produced?

Not entirely China, or Africa, or India. A vast amount of that stuff flows to... the West.

So, if the West chooses to reduce its consumption significantly, the CO2 emissions of China will go down.

The consumers have to take the blame. It's as clear as that. And the West should fund climate-resilient infra for people and green tech for China and India and Vietnam. Because it is to West that stuff goes. But that's another issue. It is because there is demand in the West, China produce stuff.

If every American buys only one pair of shoes and a couple of new tshirts every year, and not more, and buys a smartphone after using one for 4 years, not less, the CO2 emission of China will go down.

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I understood your argument, and I did already address the point you want to continue with here.

> ultimate use (who buys the end product of China's emissions), and historical contributions. However, to ignore China's absolute , ongoing contribution as the world's largest emitter (by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...) is clearly an error.

"Ultimate use" discusses consumption by the West. This fact does not exonerate China, as China directly causes the emissions in order to satisfy its economic ambitions, and profits from its _factual_ role as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. If China did not offer these exports, perhaps someone else would. But right now, it's China.

I also threw in "historical contributions" to throw you a bone. Nonetheless, right now, its China and China's emissions are, even still, increasing.

If you want to pass the buck to the West that's fine, but the reality is that China is producing more emissions than anybody else is, and it does it for the benefit of China at the expense of the planet.

> China is producing

Is it?

Chinese companies are doing it for the profit, no doubt. But the West's unsustainable consumption standards should share the blame. China only do this because the West buy. And Western companies shift their production to China for cheaper labour, mainly.

Many American companies are actually doing the polluting. Not only Chinese companies produce in China. So, in a world with blurry boundaries, please take into account the production of Western companies, in Chinese physical borders, and stuff that China export to the West.

It is China now, it will be India, too, some years into the future. Where you write from the third iPhone (produced in India) that you bought in the last two years, that India and China are to blame for the pollution, where your second big heavy car sits in the garage, the rare earth minerals for which were mined in China, for an American company, and a roomba cleans your floor (also produced in China), that reads "carbon-neutral". You just hear the bell, and someone delivers your pizza, who is a climate refugee from a small pacific island.

You are not to blame. China and India are polluting!

I think you're ignoring the fact that China is, factually, the leading greenhouse gas emitter.

Your argument has now shifted to focus on consumer demand. Yet, even examination of this angle will reveal that China's state policies create the artificially low prices that fuel that consumption.

The issue isn't simply that "the West buys things." It's that China's government actively engineers this hyper-consumption as the Chinese economic policy.

The CSIS (link below) describes this as a system of "nonmarket policies" and "state-driven overproduction." This is accomplished through massive government subsidies that allow Chinese companies to operate at a loss and "dump" cheap goods onto the global market.

The "unsustainable consumption" you describe is, therefore, a direct response to a market deliberately distorted by China for the sake of its economic ambitions.

Furthermore, the CSIS article explicitly states that these dumping policies support China's "pollution-intensive" and "carbon-intensive" manufacturing.

All this is to show that the problem is not reducible to consumer choice, but more so a deliberate strategy by the Chinese state.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs-...

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