[fasthands9]

Per capita emissions in the US and other western nations are declining even when you account for production shifted to other countries

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-...

I don't truly see the "no one knows how to do anything end to end". This is somewhat true - but I don't know if 500 years ago the same person necessarily knew how to work with bronze and to raise cattle and to preserve foods for the winter. Perhaps it seems easier since there was less things, but there was also a lot less ability to move around and learn about things so I'm not so sure.

Ultimately it seems like the absolute worst case scenario is that a shock causes a partial collapse of western society to the point where people are very poor and not able to use technology we take for granted, but this is pretty close to what an honest degrowther sees as the best case scenario. If you want to experience life as it existed before modern technology there are plenty of places in the world that moreorless still live as they did hundreds of years ago - and it would only be romanticizing them so say they dont have their own very severe issues that are objectively worse than what we have.

[benwad]

One glaring omission from that article is any mention of per-capita emissions. The author keeps asserting that US-based measures to combat climate change are ineffective because China pollutes more, but the US (and all Western countries) have a far larger per-capita footprint than China. Policies to reduce this footprint could have a huge effect on emissions globally, even though the US isn't the total biggest emitter in the world.

[md2020]

Yeah the same author has a reply to that since the per-capita emissions point is brought up a lot: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-per-capita-emissions-i...