Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

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This is somewhat to be expected though, because energy use in China is still growing (from industrialization and catch-up in living standards) and barely at European levels, while European/US energy use has been decreasing slightly already (efficiency improvements, electrification, low/negative growth for energyy-heavy industries).

US energy use is ~2x higher per person though than Europe or China, giving much more room for reductions.

So you'd expect emission changes in China to require the most "effort" (difficult to cut emissions while energy demand/use grows), followed by Europe (where energy use is already down to current chinese levels and demand/use is decreasing), while making progress in the US is by far the easiest since you very high baseline makes it much easier to cut/reduce.

This tracks with political reality I feel.

Energy use: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...

CO2/capita (basically the same): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

If it is territorial emissions, couldn't it also be that EU and US consume more products made and exported from China?

The CO2/capita in my comparison is already consumption based, i.e. trade-adjusted.

For specific countries like Switzerland this makes a big difference (times 3!), but for the US and even China this matters surprisingly little.

Here's the unadjusted numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Well we have had 2 years of orange man with the rollback of climate related consumer incentives/tax credits, paying an offshore wind farm developer to go away, pushing more fossil fuel friendly legislation, etc.

And yet we end up basically neck-and-neck with the EU that is almost religious about all things green.

So that to me is surprising and brings into question how much government policy matters vs relative global market costs.

I do agree with you that things could've went even worse given Trump2.

But its important to keep in mind that only the relative change stayed similar. US is worse than EU/China by a factor of 2 (in emissions/capita); under a "good" government, I'd hope for that factor to actually decrease instead of just staying the same.

Trump2 already effected climate-negative outcomes; among other things, DOGE cut/cancelled some big projects for "green concrete" which is a significant emission source.

But policy decisions like this can take a long time until they are visible in emission curves. You could argue that only in the last years we've started reaping the investments from German (and to a lesser degree Japanese) government investments into solar power back in the early 2000's, and the whole solar boom might have only come half a decade later without those (so calling it a triumph of market forces over policy might be highly reductive).

I do question if some of the US energy intensity factor is again economic in two ways - we are wealthier/higher income, and also have lower energy costs because we are an energy producer.

US emissions per capita are somewhere around the average of OPEC countries for example.

I can't quite find this dataset but would be interesting to compare say rich EU country households making > 100K EUR to a similar US cohort what that would look like.

Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway and Austria are all similar in adjusted median income and all of those emit significantly less, so there should be room for improvement.

Norway cheats with overabundant hydro though, and population density is admittedly higher.

I think comparing income cohorts would be very difficult because you just don't have the data to accurately assign emissions (e.g. just consider emissions from roadworks/public infrastructure: How to even split those?)

Median income (living cost adjusted): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...

Per capita emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

Nothing neck-to-neck about this, US emissions are >twice the EU per capita emissions.

It's like saying "I beat Tom Brady / Kobe / Ronaldo / etc. in their training commitment, because I increased traininig time by 1000% since starting to go running after only sitting on a sofa all day, but they essentially stayed at the same level. Losers."

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