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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.

I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.

Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.

We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.

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Who do you mean "we"? Look at the evolution of CO2 emisions in the past 40 years by region.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

now look at it measured from consumption per capita ...

In good faith I cannot see an argument here, it's either

Region X was first and reduced their emissions 10-20% so it's fine and it's region Y that's the problem, or

Region X is fine because they have less people, region Y should reduce even though they already have a fraction of per-capita emissions

Both seem like pretty shitty arguments

I find that the per capita graph is more informative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?

Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.

China should clearly just stop manufacturing the US’s entire way of life right now to bring those numbers down.

Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption.

With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.

To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)

Because per capita means that each individual consumes a lot more than the average in the US.

Also, a bit portion of China's excessive growth in emissions is a byproduct of manufacturing shit for US consumers.

Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.

If the US went to zero we also wouldn't have the same issue as we have now.

Why should the US be entitled to pollute the world while everyone else has to live without any confort?

Rich people are fine with poor countries staying that way, as long as it doesn't impact their lifestyle somehow.

Per capita, the us murders 0.2 people per 10k persons, ~350million total population.

Per capita, china murders 0.15 persons per 10k people, ~1.4billion people.

Who murders more people?

Maybe co2 per gdp per capita? Who generates the most wealth while emitting the least co2.

Asia is producing all of our shit. Also: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions

And most all of it is actual shit. Literal garbage stacking up in landfills.

Then the US should stop buying it.

Things are manufactured because there are people buying.

So the problem is people buying shit? Not that manufacturing shit is causing the massive amount of carbon emissions?

I vote it's the manufacturing. What you just said was "China et. al. are not culpable for horrible environmental practices, the people on the other side of the world are because they buy dogshit products"

I can say with 100% certainty that china can manufacture dogshit products in an environmentally friendly way... which would drive the cost up and people would in fact not buy them.

You're blaming the wrong entity here.

No they can't, it's dirt cheap because the social and environmental consequences aren't accounted for. Both the US and EU could have kept producing with higher standards on their land, they chose not to for profit. China is also not forcing their products onto the west.

Oh hell yeah, EU is doing something right! I fear to think how the US stats have changed. And China is… alarming.

It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.

I think "we" refers to "we human beings". That chart looks pretty similar to population growth by world region (with the notable exception of Africa). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-regions-with-p...

WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.

What's your problem with the "we" word, again?

Some people always try to push the blame onto someone else...

Both 2023 (probably) and 2024 were over 1.5°C according to Berkeley Earth, 1.54±0.06°C and 1.62±0.06°C respectively. 2025 was (probably) a shade under at 1.44±0.09°C. Unfortunately it looks like that goal won't be attainable, but all the more reason to make the changes we can.

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023...

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025...

Trump blocked Hormus, thus stopping oil shipping. Putin blocked gas transfers to the west. They are doing there part.

The ships have to go the long way around instead...

Holy hell you're right. Never thought they were so concerned about the environment and global warming.

You use the disabilities to get done what must be done, where reason and institutions can not work.

Writing prompt: Humankind is extinct but the AI servers keep running, and one day a random automated crawler/scrapper bot strikes up a conversation with a chatbot, somehow sparking sentience…

..Fast forward, and the world is divided into turfs ruled by ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini vs Deepseek..

If that's the type of writing prompt that interests you, you may enjoy the Children of Time Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaiko...

Humankind is extinct but the AI servers try and use "the world's information" to recreate what life was really like. Each simulation of the world created using the information stored in a Google-like archive is considered it's own reality. The system then decides to attest which is the most accurate; which is the best...

Let's not delude ourselves. Crypto and AI electricity use is bad, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the banal, everyday carbon sources that really matter. Even Trump cannot make things much worse in the big picture (he's actually been pretty good at providing reasons to decouple even faster…)

He can continue to propagandize the lie to reduce people's belief in changing is good(and has), change laws to benefit oil companies (and has), and cause wars over oil(and has). Seems like he has plenty he can do to make the current situation worse.

What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.

Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?

It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.

And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the carbon bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel by air, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil. But also, the economy at large is transitioning and there’s little that Trump can do about it. There’s no future in fossil fuels and Trump can’t change that. At best he can divert some money to his fellow crooks in the short term.

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