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by bigbugbag
3392 days ago
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Except these two countries are quite an upscale from the late 19th to 20th century occidental air pollution issue, an upscale of one or two order of magnitude. Even if they both stopped every source of pollution instantly right now, the consequences would still last decades. Even if they do something, improving the pollution situation is not enough by a large margin, keep in mind the occident failed to fix their own air pollution issue to this day. Economies of scale may well worsen the situation further due to Jevons paradox, while most renewables are actually not renewables at all. The only way out is a radical global change including a large decrease in energy consumption and this will come when the massive overpopulation issue will fix itself through famine due to lack of oil to grow food "green revolution" style. There's not doubt that reality will catch up on us, it is just a matter of time as this is now inevitable. Our choice is between crashing full speed ahead in a wall of brick or trying to slow down to crash in a hopefully somewhat less dramatic manner. |
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I think you're underestimating how much polluting the west has been doing. After all, China got into the game only in the last maybe 20 years.
As of 2011, the United States had released 28% of the world's total post-industrial revolution green house gasses, while China contributed 9%: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/21/countrie...
Now granted 2011 was 7 years ago, but just eyeballing, if the US had stopped all its emissions and China released its current rate of 9.6B tonnes each year, they'd have to emit for another 24 years before they caught up to the United State's emissions.
That's not to say that China shouldn't clean up its emissions before they become the new #1 emitter, but we who live in the west have to do our part as well.
This should also be concerning: The US has over twice the emissions per capita as China [1], and China is not yet done developing. Basically if all nations are aiming to develop into the united states, we're hosed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...