| While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business. If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world. We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see: * World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles. * World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement. * Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle. * Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries. https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... |