Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by boveus 1029 days ago
> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?

If the effect of global warming were felt equally in the US and that somehow caused the US to halt 100% of their emissions it would reduce global emissions by about 11% [1].

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-emissi...

2 comments

I don't understand how people make that point in 2023 still

China is the world's factory, 20% of the US imports come from there, of course your own country doesn't pollute much when you gutted half of your industries and relocated them in foreign countries.

edit: don't forget per capita greenhouse emissions too, in that case Americans emit twice as much as Chinese https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

I don't understand how people can be apologists for China's carbon emissions in 2023 still.

Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596....

And you can't deny that the US and EU has been moving in the right direction, while China is moving in the wrong direction.

US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been moving down ever since. China's carbon emissions have grown by 500% during that time period. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies. It's clear that China does not care about climate change in the slightest.

> Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports

Here it says 33%: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14412-33-of-chinas-ca...

> They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies.

Of course India is nowhere close to China, they basically don't exist in term of exports. These countries have almost nothing in common besides having a large population

https://statisticsanddata.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Top...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

> while China is moving in the wrong direction.

You sure about that ?

https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/267233/renewable-energy-c...

Again it's easy to pollute less when you literally shut down all your industries. You can't ask for more and more growth, cheaper and cheaper prices and 0 pollution.

> China does not care about climate change in the slightest.

Not more or less than 99% of countries on this earth, including the US and most of Europe. If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago, as well as most of their exports and massively reduced their energy usage (daily reminder than the average US household uses 4 times more energy than a German one)

> You sure about that ?

Yes, China built six times the number of coal plants of the entire rest of the world last year. Six times! It's inexcusable.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

Meanwhile the US has mothballed half of it's coal plants in 10 years:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html

> Here it says 33%

You're clearly cherry picking very old data (2008) that is not published research to try and make a point here. The references aren't even comparable.

> If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago

Plenty of people would be delighted to embargo China due to their environmental record. If that's what you're proposing, we agree.

2008 China was way different.
For the US to halt emissions there would be policy in place to make sure emissions made somewhere else get appropriately priced, hence the effects of emissions reductions in the developed world impact everywhere else.
The main problem with global emissions is with developing countries who are increasing their emissions while at the same time taking up a greater share of global emissions than developed countries.

See: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...

Yes, environmental parity tariffs.