[gumby]

> (All in favour of it, just everyone has to play along)

It's worth doing even if others don't. Especially for the wealthy countries -- the poor countries emit relatively little carbon per capita.

The new energy transition is from op ex to cap ex. Looks expensive in the short term but a big win in the medium and long term. Plus you get the benefit of reduced emissions. Sure, other people do, but even if you're selfish it's a good deal.

[bcrosby95]

It's not the 20th century anymore. China's per capita emissions are higher than you're letting on. Higher than some European countries.

[JumpCrisscross]

Wow, China's per capita emissions were, in 2018, ahead of Israel, Ireland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, Denmark, Italy, the U.K., Hungary, Portugal, Turkey, France, Switzerland, Croatia, Sweden, Ukraine, Latvia, Romania...the list they're behind may be shorter [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

[hilios]

I think those numbers lump the emissions from goods produced in china and exported to other countries in with the emissions from domestic consumption. So they are inflated by China's vast exports. Yet even if you use consumption based emissions, China was around Spain's numbers in 2016 and by now probably has overtaken quite a few of the European countries.

[shubb]

China built a huge amount of infrastructure ranging from huge concrete cities to freeways and dams.

This infrastructure uses a lot of steel and concrete. It is not just an input for export goods - they are places for people to live.

Given that infrastructure building has set commodity prices for a decade, it wild be surprising if it wasn't the main part of thier emissions.

We can't begrudge Chinese, Indian and African people a modern way of life. Building that stuff emissions carbon. Its a difficult problem.

In a way trying to call a Chinese freeway an input emission for westbound exports is a moral cop-out.

[Avshalom]

It's worth doing especially if others don't.

Like whats the alternative: get into an arms race to see who can boil the oceans fastest? Oh but we'll make slightly more money than India from steel manufacturing so it will definitely be worth it?

[goatlover]

The climate doesn’t care about per capita. The developing world has the majority of the population, so the majority of additional CO2 will be coming from there.

[boterock]

Fun way to look at it, you at the north give us a lot of planned obsolence goods in exchange for our monies. North even gets into politics pushing developing countries infrastructure towards oil economies. and then, we consume what you led us to, and suddenly we're the bad guys.

[goatlover]

Humanity is the bad guy. Well, the planet doesn’t care. It’s about how much climate change we want to deal with.

[realityking]

In effect you‘re saying that countries that are poor today must not be allowed to reach the level of western countries. I don‘t have a good word for it but that‘s a very specific worldview.

If we believe that every country has the right to develop, than the poorest countries emission will increase. Better technology will flatten that increase but those are expensive. Wealthy countries pioneering the widespread use of these technologies will reduce cost and allow developing countries to deploy them in the future.

[dukeyukey]

Arguably, developing countries nowadays have a _massive_ advantage in that they could industrialise in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the human suffering developed countries went through _because_ of greentech.

Like, instead of committing millions of your citizens to coal mining with picks and steam-powered lifts, you can just buy or produce turbines and solar panels, put them up and enjoy the benefits of electrification. Worst case, you build cheap has turbines and buy or pump LNG.

[spacebanana7]

> In effect you‘re saying that countries that are poor today must not be allowed to reach the level of western countries. I don‘t have a good word for it but that‘s a very specific worldview.

Being charitable, it’d clearly be an environmental disaster if everyone in the world consumed oil at the per capita level of OECD countries. I imagine global oil consumption would multiply manyfold.

> Wealthy countries pioneering the widespread use of these technologies will reduce cost and allow developing countries to deploy them in the future.

I too used to think this, but it seems like most of the progress in solar has come from China. Similar with nuclear power plants.

[itishappy]

From my understanding, China's implementation rate for solar was still quite low. Would that not support the point that they're progressing the tech to sell to other countries?

[ZeroGravitas]

Implementaion rate for solar is low but growing fast everywhere, but China is leading in production, deployment and generation beating the USA and EU combined.

> China was responsible for about 38% of solar PV generation growth in 2021, thanks to large capacity additions in 2020 and 2021. The second largest generation growth (17% share of the total) was recorded in the United States, and third largest in the European Union (10%).

[dukeyukey]

China doesn't have a great geography for solar. Towards the East, it's either too humid or too far North to reap the full benefits of solar panel, and out West there aren't the population centres to make big differences.

So yeah, I'm guessing it's mostly to sell to countries with better sar geographies, especially the US and Australia.

[goatlover]

I'm not saying that. I think countries should do what they need to do and hopefully we can figure out how to deal with climate change together. I doubt we keep warming below 2.5 degrees.

[g42gregory]

China has 1.5 billion people and per capita emissions higher than most Western countries. If you multiply the two numbers...