> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.
This is just a naive take. You'd obviously expect chinese emissions to be higher (than the US) assuming similar industrialization, because you are counting emissions for like triple the amount of people.
What you conveniently fail to mention: US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each, and China basically just caught up to emission levels of developed countries (EU, Japan), while still being significantly below US levels. High income countries combined still emit more than China, too (richest ~15% globally).
If your argument would make any sense, then the obvious solution would be to split China into 3 countries, making the emissions instantly negligible compared to the EU/US. Problem solved?!
There is no reality where we make good progress toward climate change without the "main culprits" (=> nations with highest historical and per-capita emissions) making the first steps.
Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
You could argue that wind/solar is a huge success story in this regard already, with western nations driving lots of the research/development/commercialization efforts (over the previous decades) and now indirectly causing much bigger nations like China to transition onto those very quickly instead of basically fully relying on fossils for decades to come.
> Why would a country like India pay/sacrifice to reduce emissions while western citizens still pollute at much higher levels after reaping all the spoils from historical pollution?
To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?
Even for a giant country like India you control <20% of global population, and you are responsible for much less than 20% of the effect (climate change).
So why would India take more expensive and painful steps than say, the US or EU, or Japan? India both indisputably affects and controls climate change less then the US or EU, so why would they put in completely outsized amounts of effort to fight it?
Because much more of their land will become uninhabitable.
And also we should be helping them.
Which leader do you think is more likely to get elected by the populace? The one who tells the destitute Indians they must suffer more, lest their home be lost, or the one who says it’s America’s fault, and that they should pay in MANY ways for what they’re doing to the Indians’ home?
And besides, what do you think they’re going to do? Give up their highly efficient motor bikes? Destroy their personal businesses and starve? How far do you think we could push them? Maybe we could convince them all to just die to make room for our pollution and their nuclear-backed army will agree happily.
I swear half the arguments I see are just completely lacking in regard for the fact that this is happening in the real world, and not a vacuum.
You miss the fact that China's GDP per capita is 1/6th the US. So to produce 1/6th per person they emits 2/3rds the CO2. Which means in total, the thing that matters, is that china produces 4 times the CO2 with no end in sight. They are 99% to blame for the current situation.
No they're 15% to blame for the current situation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
The EU-27 is 17% to blame.
The US is 24% to blame.
Yesterday's CO2 emissions cause today's problems. Today's CO2 emissions will cause tomorrow's problems.
If total matters then it's historic total per capita where US is (far) ahead, "current" is 100s of years on climate scale. Unless one insists on only stats that makes PRC to blame. All per capita GDP vs per captial emissions reflects is PRC gdp per capita (btw PPP is 1/3 US) is massively underreported, i.e. comports with other proxy indicators like how PRC consume a lot of goods at per capita rates higher than 1/6 nominal and 1/3 per capita would suggest.
... so if you are some poor rice farmer, you should be forbidden from even heating in winter, but if you're rich enough, flying around the globe all day is a-ok?
I'm not sure exactly how this sounds like a good argument to you, but I can assure you most certainly that less wealthy persons will not find it convincing.
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What do you even mean by "arguing at scale"?
I have a point and numbers to back it up, I don't see either on your side.
> US citizens still emit over 50% more CO2 each
The problem the US has per-capita is lower population density. The majority of the US population lives in suburban or rural areas without mass transit and changing that on the relevant timescale is not feasible. It also has major population centers in areas that experience winter and thereby have higher energy costs for heating, exacerbated by the lower population density (more square feet of indoor space to heat per capita), with the same infeasible timescale for changing that.
As a result, the only way to fix it is to switch to other forms of energy rather than having any real hope of significantly reducing consumption in terms of GWh. Use more electric cars and hybrids, generate electricity using solar, wind and nuclear, switch from fossil fuels to electric heat pumps for heating, etc. But that's largely what's happening. The percentage of hybrid vehicles goes up, despite Trump's posturing nobody actually wants coal, ~100% of net new generation capacity in recent years is solar and wind and even when new natural gas plants are built, they're displacing old coal fired ones, which results in a net reduction in CO2. It would be nice if this would happen faster, but at least the number is going in the right direction.
The problem China has is that they've been building brand new coal fired power plants at scale. WTF.
Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different. The latter is denying agency in the situation.
> Assume the avg. home will last 50 years. Limit construction on new suburban developments, problem solved in 50+ years. It would be unpopular, but you claimed it wouldn't be possible, very different.
The impossible part of "problem solved in 50+ years" is the 50+ years when you need it to be solved sooner than that, and it can be solved sooner than that by doing something else, namely electrifying heating and transportation and using renewables and nuclear to generate electricity.
We're kinda doing that, through zoning requirements and NIMBY politics. It is, as predicted, very unpopular, and has a number of unfortunate side effects like rising homelessness, declining fertility, and increasing inflation.
On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.
You listed out a whole lot of excuses for America, suburbia this, heating that, etc etc, etc...
Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants instead of directing the same labor to building more nuclear or renewable generation? There is no reason to build coal, Trump is a schmuck for proposing it but China have been the ones actually doing it.
Chinese demand is increasing just like everyone else's, and they're both retiring older less efficient plants and using fossil fuels as both peaker and baseline generation. But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China. There's plenty of reason to build out coal capacity to keep grids stabilized while you transition to solar and wind (China finished their 2030 1200GW solar capacity target 6 years early in 2024 and continue to grow that number at an incredible rate).
I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.
> But coal utilization overall, despite massive growth in energy demand, is basically flat in China.
"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.
> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita
You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.
The difference in coal power for china is basically purely from them using coal instead of gas, see comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276338
Despite higher carbon intensity (for now), they still emit less Co2 per person on electricity than the US (because they need/use less).
Sure but they don't burn oil because they don't have oil. So focus on fossil fuels in general, or emissions rather than just coal specifically - again it's not good to add new coal plants but they're growth negative. And EU has done an admirable job of reducing their emissions, with help of course from Chinese manufacturing of pv cells etc.
They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
> They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined
All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.
China needs some form of dispatchable power and is basically using coal instead of gas because they have none. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276338 for numbers/more detail.
Japan, Spain and France also have negligible oil and gas production and didn't go all-in on coal as a result. Spain is 0.32% coal and 22.5% natural gas. France is 0.31% coal and 5.7% natural gas.
They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.
It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.
The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
> What excuse actually is there for building new coal plants
Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.
Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.
> Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?
The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
Come on. This is bullshit and you know it. There's >10M light trucks sold each year and <3M passenger cars.
This is not because most of those trucks are used by some business, this is because people like to drive around in them.
The 40+ MPG Hybrid Toyota RAV4 is a "light truck" in those numbers.
⬆ what he said