> The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia
Developed nations have polluted the planet for decades, with highest rates of energy consumption per capita. They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living. They have lived their excess and now lecture the world that their "90% of emissions are from consumption"
One group of people have taken the world for granted. Now want everyone else to bear the cost. Typical.
It's not lecturing. It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels. Even if emissions went to zero, it would only push the timeline back a few years
This is the problem I have with people who claim to care about the catastrophic impact of climate change. It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries than it is about actually working to reduce the CO2 in the environment. If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be on preventing that to happen rather than Monday morning quarterbacking the last 100 years of industrialization?
I agree with you, and to add to your remarks, I suspect if most first world countries implemented a sufficiently strict border adjustment ("carbon tariff") for trade with China, etc it would probably do quite a lot to motivate developed nations to improve as well.
Anyway, I find the criticisms of the West to be both ignorant and tiring. Tiring because the "blame the West for everything" meme is so worn out and ignorant because there's a pretty stark difference between pioneering industrialization centuries before mature climate science and China's ratcheting up pollution knowing full-well the consequences.
The US emits about twice the CO2 per year as India, 3x Russia, 4x Japan, 6x Germany, 7x South Korea, 8x Canada, 10x Mexico, 12x Australia, 13x UK, 14x France, and 18x Taiwan.
By your logic then shouldn't most first world countries also implement a strict carbon tariff on the US?
Maybe they should. But I can't help but comment that you're abusing statistics here. Smaller population countries like Canada and Australia pollute more per capita than the US. Also, the carbon tariff should ideally be applied on an activity-specific basis, not at the national level.
> But I can't help but comment that you're abusing statistics here.
Actually, that was kind of the point. For problems dealing with scarce resources that are shared planet wide (such as the atmosphere or oceans) any fair system to determine how those resources are allocated needs to take into account population, but enforcement of any such allocation has to be done by country. The atmosphere doesn't care about our arbitrary political boundaries, but for enforcement they matter.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking that both enforcement and allocation should be by country.
> Smaller population countries like Canada and Australia pollute more per capita than the US.
Australia does indeed emit more per capita than the US, about 4% more. Canada emits about 4% less. The only countries ahead of the US per capita besides Australia are Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, UAE, New Caledonia, the Dutch part of Sint Maarten, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan.
South Korea is about 25% less. Taiwan and Russia are about 30% less than the US per capita. Germany and Japan are about 40% less. The UK and France are about 65% less. Mexico around 72% less. (China is about 55% less).
> Also, the carbon tariff should ideally be applied on an activity-specific basis, not at the national level.
Correct. The way this would probably best be handled if we had a world government would be a revenue neutral carbon tax on everything. But we don't, so we have to cobble together something else.
I don’t think this makes sense because American productivity depends so much on pollution outsourced to countries like India. For example, if US cars are assembled “greenly” from components that are manufactured dirtily, then it hardly seems meaningful to brag that America’s productivity is “greener”. And do bear in mind that I’m not one of the folks who are determined to make the US out to be the bad guy in every thread.
We don't export a lot of electricity. We do export a decent amount of agriculture, but my understanding is we don't export a ton of meat - which is where the majority of the carbon comes from.
Yes, I'm fully on board with that. No country should enjoy a competitive advantage because they externalize costs onto the environment. I don't think the US is a particularly grievous culprit on the global stage, but if everyone implements fair border adjustments then it's moot.
A good amount of emissions from China go into the goods produced for western countries (such as the U.S.). The pollution has been outsourced and externalized.
That's exactly the point of a border adjustment. China out-competes with clean manufacturing because it is more willing to pollute. Western countries should tax goods that are manufactured in polluting countries so they don't enjoy a competitive advantage over clean alternatives. This is probably "necessary but insufficient" sort of thing, but it solves the problem you're highlighting.
> But the US is worse when it comes to CO2 emmited per capita. That means that US should also be taxed.
China - as all nations - has a responsibility based on its population scale (ie its total emissions output), not just its per capita output. The total output matters far more than per capita, as we're dealing with a matter of planetary survival, not whether it's fair that Monaco has higher emissions output per capita than China.
Other nations are not responsible for China having those 1.4 billion people. China bears that responsibility. Other nations are obviously not responsible for the US having its per capita emissions output, either.
Estonia having 4x the per capita emissions output of the US wouldn't pose a terminal risk for the planet. And sure, maybe it's fair to argue a tax to incentivize per capita behavior of high per capita emissions nations. And what to do about China's total output risk, given it's going to destroy the planet (whereas smaller nations do not pose that risk)? The logical thing would be to apply taxes to both, in a way the keeps the planet from getting destroyed: it means China can never be allowed to have parity with smaller nations that have high per capita outputs.
China, with its 1.4 billion people, would pose a terminal risk for the globe if it reaches per capita emissions output parity with the US (actually it's already approaching that risk now, and it's merely half way to parity). Taxes don't mean much if half the planet is wrecked. China has a different responsibility than Estonia does given China can all by itself destroy the world with its emissions. I use Estonia merely as an example to highlight the point, very obviously the US has a responsibility as well based on its scale. Sure, we can focus a tax in on Estonia in that case, however it's by far not our most pressing matter.
China going from ~28% of global emissions to ~45%, is a very pressing matter. The globe can't afford China to increase at all at this point.
If a country had four billion people, it similarly wouldn't be reasonable for it to reach emissions parity with the US: it would kill everyone in doing so.
The equation of fairness must also consider the scale of the threat being posed, as it's also not fair if one outsized population nation gets to destroy the planet because it has 1.4 billion people. One can live in fantasy (where fairness means every nation gets equal emissions output per capita), or live in reality. In reality it matters how many people you have and what their per capita emissions are. Reality is course the dimension where we can all die from the emissions output of a nation the scale of China.
What matters is fantasy when it isn't politically feasible. The only consensus for an emissions regulatory framework is going to be based on per capita. Growing populous countries with the most say will never agree to anything else which is counter to their interests, i.e. China could propose a framework based on de-growth since the PRC population is set to decline to less than 1B by the end of the century, but western countries that rely on growth via immigration would never be up for it even if ultimately de-growth is the more pragmatic solution. Reality is also going to be that emission standards will be based on historic per capita emissions since developing countries will need to catch up on new infra emissions which western nations hide in historic emission data. Reality is global warming is less politically existential than poverty and development for domestic politics for many countries, as long as it kills others more than yourself, even if it ultimately kills everyone. This highlights the even more unpalatable reality that there are climate change winners and losers.
Climate change discussions remind me of covid19 policy wank and panic control but stretched out over decades. Many of us were fairly confident covid19 was going to be a pandemic we’ll have to live with, that’s just reality when most of the world do not have capability to respond properly. There’s a lot of interventions and technologies leading countries can export to mitigate, but ultimately everyone has to come to an understanding that we can’t stop climate change due to political realities.
We've known the consequences since at least the 70s. Industry has done everything they could to cover it up and propagandize the population into believing otherwise.
> China's ratcheting up pollution knowing full-well the consequences
That if they didn't their population would remain poor, and lacking access to healthcare, food, and water? And in an even worse situation when climate change finally hit? Are you suggesting that if China hadn't concentrated on development, the developed countries would be currently falling over themselves to fix the problem?
My recommendation which China is already seems to be taking is to go for nuclear power and solar in that order. Maybe add some hydropower to the mix but they have a plenty of it.
The chief problem is that they're not ramping up nuclear quickly enough, and it's hard to deploy in desert west of the country.
And thanks to our persistent self-sabotage there's civil unrest related to these power plants.
The nuclear is to be used to ramp production of solar PV and batteries cleanly, then decommissioned. Timeframe would be 25 years.
Decommissioning of current old reactors is a problem already but there's really no alternative - ramping solar PV with standard energy sources would be bad. A lot of reactors are expected to shut down by 2025...
You framed Chinese development as compassion for Chinese citizens. I pointed out that the Chinese government doesn't much care about the welfare of its citizens.
I don't think I said "compassion" anywhere. But today they do obviously care about having an economically strong nation with a good standard of living. It's what will help keep them in power.
We're not talking about today, we're not just talking about the last ~50+ years. And moreover, even today they are pretty happy infringing on many other rights of their citizens.
Politicization threw a wrench into COVID and it’s doing the same to climate change. Years of media gaslighting, fear mongering, and authoritarian tactics have left us in a social reality where nobody cares any longer what the talking heads in the media or shouting on social media have to say.
I would argue that the problem is that we care far to much about what the talking heads in the media and the shouting on social media. That's the source of misinformation and inaction on climate change.
This may be country dependent. In the US, the Supreme Court has been clear that there is no hate speech limitation to the 1st amendment, for example. But there are limits to lying, as in perjury and libel cases.
It's difficult to judge speech even by contemporary standards. There tend to be high bars for bad speech, clearly harmful, E.G. fire in a crowd when there isn't fire.
How easy is it to prove something is a lie, rather than a very selective viewpoint or opinion? What if someone chooses to believe a set of sources biased to their preferred outcome?
We should also be lucky to encounter and hopefully have laws against hate speech; the slippery slope stuff that's subjectively icky but not quite across that line is more insidious.
> It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels.
Sure there is. We've had two experiments where we saw this happen:
April 2020 - for a very short time when Western economies took a major hit, emissions dipped quite substantially.
In 2008 - The global financial crisis, which did impact the world, started in the US and again caused on of the only major notable dips in emissions we've seen.
It's very clear that US consumption and economic activity is directly tied to GHG emissions globally. If just the US had decided to remain in our April 2020 depressed economic state, and cooled from there, we would have seen a downward trend in emissions.
Maybe you would argue that economic shrinking is not "realistic" (in which case we are most certainly doomed, unless we run out of fossil fuels before we cross certain boundaries). The common argument is people won't tolerate a radical change in lifestyles... but that change is coming either way. However extreme the changes need to prevent catastrophic climate change, they are certainly less extreme then letting climate change run it's course.
I personally believe we will not chose this path, but don't pretend that this path doesn't exist. As the center of the global economy the United States fully has the capability to reduce global emissions.
Alternatively if we run into a economic crisis of unprecedented scale, which looks reasonably possible, we'll also see reduction in emissions without having to worry about "choosing" this path.
> It's very clear that US consumption and economic activity is directly tied to GHG emissions globally.
This is true today, but it will not be true in the future.
In the past and today, it was the contention both of fossil fuel interests and of degrowthers that emissions and economic activity are inseparable.
However, we are showing that that's not true. If you look back since 2008, sure, the big economic contractions showed big drops in emissions. But also, with economic expansion, we are lowering emissions, just at a lower rate.
And in fact, the true decoupling of GHG and GDP will involve a spectacular amount of economic activity. A huge number of jobs for everything from the obvious like deploying wind turbines and batteries and solar panels and expanding grid distribution and transmission, to less obvious stuff like insulating homes and installing heat pumps in place of natural gas.
There is another path, with massive economic growth, that results in complete decoupling of GHG and GDP. This is the easiest path in terms of lifestyle changes, but the most difficult path in terms of upsetting entrenched powerful interests.
> There is another path, with massive economic growth, that results in complete decoupling of GHG and GDP. This is the easiest path in terms of lifestyle changes, but the most difficult path in terms of upsetting entrenched powerful interests.
People have been fantasizing about this my entire life and all we've seen in more environmental destruction, and accelerated GHG emissions. I remember hearing things like this all the time in 2006 when an Inconvenient Truth was big. At the time I thought "that sounds reasonable and the only test will be time".
Here we are, likely already past some crucial boundary conditions with no immediate signs that we'll achieve any of the new targets we have set (since we've already missed all the old ones).
> This is true today, but it will not be true in the future.
How much time do you think we have? In 2000 maybe this was a reasonable argument, but even if emissions dropped to zero today we still have already signed up for plenty of climate change.
Despite vigorous GDP growth, which is showing the decoupling of GDP and emissions. (Total US emissions have also dropped over the past 15 years, but I am having trouble finding a clean graph of that quickly)
I do not believe, and scientists do not believe, that we are past help, or that we have locked in so much change that everything is hopeless. See, for example, this interview:
We know that RCP8.5 isn't going to happen. But we also know that our actions now have big big consequences.
We have a huge opportunity to change our future, right now. That window of opportunity is closing quickly.
Everything we do it reduce emissions now will make the future a much much better place. We really do have the opportunity to change our behavior and keep a planet that is as welcoming to us as it is today.
If you honestly don't believe this, I suggest skimming the (massive) SR15 report form the IPCC. It's getting out of date in terms of the technology available today that wasn't when it was written, but it should provide you with a lot of hope and a lot of reason to take action now:
Because we have continually outsourced our emissions to China while still reaping the financial benefits of expoiting resources in those countries. I know there are studies that try to account for this but they still fail to look at the bigger picture of resources we have outsourced.
Cheap and large scale manufacturing in China has meant enormous benefits for the US economy. We see a decoupling of GDP and energy because we are playing tricks with accounting.
> We really do have the opportunity to change our behavior and keep a planet that is as welcoming to us as it is today.
First we are absolutely locked into increasing global warming from emissions, so we have without question given up on a planet as welcoming as today.
We do have an opportunity to change our behavior, I have repeatedly said that, but that means actually reducing fossil fuel usage, globally and immediately.
As I have said, the US can reduce global emissions because we have seen the US do this twice: April 2020 and 2008.
> a lot of hope and a lot of reason to take action now
There's reason to take action now, but since you won't even accept the notion that you might have to reduce your standard of living, at least until renewables catch up again, means we are not going to change our path.
I had these exact conversations in 2006, and very similar ones in the 1990s (though people were less sure of the extreme risks then). The IPCC reports have been for years considered by many to be far too optimistic, and again those people have been proven correct over and over again (until recently they didn't consider positive feed backs and also assume scalable CCS).
At what point would you admit you are wrong? I'll admit I'm wrong if we see three years of decreasing global emissions starting this year and reduced global emissions by 20% in the next 5 years. These aren't enough to get us to our required goals, but if I see this I'll still be shocked and admit I've been too skeptical. Currently I believe this would only happen with a catastrophic financial crisis (which may be the only way we can avoid climate catastrophe).
> Because we have continually outsourced our emissions to China while still reaping the financial benefits of expoiting resources in those countries.
That's simply not true. The chart I linked is CO2 accounting based on consumption, not US production, it takes into account Chinese emissions for US consumption.
> There's reason to take action now, but since you won't even accept the notion that you might have to reduce your standard of living,
Sorry, what? What do you know about what I want to do? My preferred life would be considered a "reduced standard of living" to many Americans, because I want to live car-free in a walkable neighborhood.
> At what point will you admit you are wrong?
When there's evidence that a position I have taken is wrong. Start sending me data!!
Will you admit that emissions have decreased, even accounting for moving production to China? Will you admit that we have cleaner energy sources ready to deploy that will replace fossil fuels, if we choose to do so? Will you admit that we can develop alternatives to industrial processes that generate non-fossil-fuel emissions? Will you admit that we can switch disastrous land use policies that reduce the ability of the ecosystem to sequester CO2?
These are all possible without a drastic reduction in the quality of life. The question is how quickly we can make that transition. At this stage in the game, nihilism is as bad as denialism. We need to make drastic drastic change, and I am doing so in my personal life, but personal action is no substitute for changing the system.
In response to this point, which is frequently brought up:
> The chart I linked is CO2 accounting based on consumption, not US production, it takes into account Chinese emissions for US consumption.
While it is certainly the case that measuring consumption is much better than measuring production, it fails to account for a lot emissions.
For example in the manufacture of solar PV, the solar panels themselves are counted, but since the companies manufacturing and processing the silicon need for these are in China selling to other Chinese companies, that is not counted even though all those fossil fuels used are used exclusively for the benefit of American companies.
That doesn't even address the issue of US companies bringing in capital for various foreign investments. If VCs make money in a Chinese company and then reinvest in your startup that money in our economy was generated with fossil fuels.
The best proxy to GHG emissions is still dollars, both on individual and nation state levels.
> Will you admit that we have cleaner energy sources ready to deploy that will replace fossil fuels, if we choose to do so?
This is not an issue of willing. "Green" energy has only been used to supplement fossil fuel usage.
We are building renewables as fast as we can and it's not enough because so far it's not replacing anything.
The only way to reduced GHG emission is to reduce fossil fuel usage, immediately. We've made tremendous expansion of renewable energy and it has not touched fossil fuel usage. If we stop fossil fuel usage today, or drastically reduce it, we will experience incredible global economic pangs.
> nihilism is as bad as denialism
There is an important form of Nihilism that many existentialists talk about which is the nihilism of pretending your action had meaning. Putting on a tie and going to work, pretending that work is real and meaningful when you know that ultimately your life is meaningless.
There's a great irony that if everyone collectively agreed we are doomed, our economic activity and emissions would likely also cool down. Our frenzied consumer activity is driven by an ideology that says tomorrow will always be better. If we let go of that we likely would live more relaxed lives in the developed world.
And, again, all I am saying is the only way to reduce GHG is to globally reduce emissions and we are not doing that at all. You can claim that the US is somehow separate from China's emissions, but you can see a global dip in emissions in 2008. I can think of no better experiment on the interconnected nature of emissions than to see how a housing crisis in the US becomes a global economic down turn which sees the most promising drop in emissions we have ever seen.
Arguably the only other solution is accelerationism, where we push economic systems to collapse faster... which is maybe what you're really going for.
> For example in the manufacture of solar PV, the solar panels themselves are counted, but since the companies manufacturing and processing the silicon need for these are in China selling to other Chinese companies, that is not counted even though all those fossil fuels used are used exclusively for the benefit of American companies.
This is simply inaccurate. US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.
Though I appreciate that there are some link here, you are still making backwards-looking statements rather than stating limitations about what could be. For example, this link:
Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.
Renewable expansion is just barely getting started. To declare "game over" already is fatalism and not founded by any sort of data.
Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.
I see lots of feelings and emotions in your post about frenzy, but we need all that frenzy. We need action and change, desperately. Economic collapse will not save us, because emitting 25% of our current emissions is not good enough.
The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.
> US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.
That's what I said, but they don't account for the manufacture of raw materials produced and sold in China to aid in the manufacture of these panels, nor of the associated infrastructure causes. They therefore underestimate the export co2.
> Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.
Energy is effectively the same as economic activity. You are correct that if we could magically replace all of the fossil fuel usage with renewables we would be at zero emissions. But again, all sources of energy production have been rising.
> Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.
Again you are correct that dollars are not CO2 emissions, but dollars are a good proxy for energy (read Smil's Energy and Civilization if you need a reference for that), and currently the vast majority of our energy needs are met with CO2 emitting fuel sources.
> The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.
Do you really not see the contradiction regarding the problem at hand and your solution? A complete transition of the economy is a incredibly destructive, insanely energy intensive process. Unless energy was already mostly renewable such a solution will only lead to the problem being worse.
I guess I'll get out of the way since this conversation has only further convinced me of how bleak our situation is.
> And, again, all I am saying is the only way to reduce GHG is to globally reduce emissions and we are not doing that at all. You can claim that the US is somehow separate from China's emissions, but you can see a global dip in emissions in 2008. I can think of no better experiment on the interconnected nature of emissions than to see how a housing crisis in the US becomes a global economic down turn which sees the most promising drop in emissions we have ever seen.
The underlying phenomenon here is not economic activity. It's that a decrease in economic activity is a proxy for a decrease in things such as pleasure transport, heating/cooling, food consumption, and other things. Decoupling these activities from emissions is what this entire thread is talking about; for example, taking a train and walking for a vacation requires much fewer emissions than flying to your destination and renting a car. It may be in vogue in environmental circles to decry growth and capitalism as two factors behind emissions, but there's nothing that precludes growth or capitalism to transition into a new lower-power regime. The problem has nothing to do with the economic systems as much as it has to do with entrenched economic actors that continue to aggressively lobby governments to convince them _not_ to pass the regulations necessary to spur innovation to decrease emissions.
To leave with a pithy saying: There's two ways to quiet a crowded room, either ask everyone to speak quietly or ask everyone to leave. Halting growth is similar to the latter option, decreasing emissions is similar to the former.
> Decoupling these activities from emissions is what this entire thread is talking about;
And my entire point, is that after 30+ years of trying to reduce emissions by adding renewables we have failed to see this happen. There is no evidence that we are getting any closer now. If any global fossil fuel usage had decline, we could say it might be being replaced with renewables, but all evidence we have shows that renewables just supplement our existing and growing needs for energy.
To go with your metaphor, we've been asking everyone to be quiet for 30+ years and the room is getting louder. If we need that room quiet or we'll get kicked out of the house for good, it's getting time to ask people to leave.
If it's this difficult to get folks to transition to lower energy-use regimes, I think it would be even more difficult to get folks to abandon growth-based economics. Unless the worst happens and our economic systems collapse due to climate events. That's what I would consider the worst case, though.
What does "growth based" economics even mean? I think it's an incoherent concept, and have never gotten the same answer from two different people on the matter. Growth of GDP? Growth of energy use? Growth of carbon emissions? Growth of population? These different types of "growth" get substituted in, silently, to move an argument forward, but if one looks at details and tries to be specific, everything falls apart.
I agree with you. In my last post I'm using "growth based" to represent the status quo, nothing more (I'm not trying to say anything about why it is growth based.) If I were writing more carefully I should have simply called it out as the status quo instead of calling it "growth based".
We haven't spent 30 years trying to reduce emissions with renewables, we've spent 3 years doing pilot projects to drive down their costs.
And we are, today, at the point where we can deploy them. Around 2016-2018, we passed an economic inflection point for new energy deployments, and in 2023 we will have been through the five year periods over which utilities typically plan, and hopefully we will have sued enough of them to force use of accurate and up to date data in their economic planning models.
Only then will we actually start to try to use renewables to decrease emissions in any sort of full force.
And with the tiny trial balloons up until now, and via increased energy efficiency, we have been increasing GDP per CO2 for years, despite your refusal to believe the data.
These are basic facts. If your conclusions requires rejecting basic facts, then the conclusions are not sound.
Zero is not the limit, emissions can go negative. India has said it already [1]
> Developed nations should not talk about Net Zero, but focus on removing carbon from the atmosphere they add. “Net negative is what they need to talk about,” Singh said.
No emissions can't go negative. It doesn't matter what India says. That's a comically unrealistic claim, especially given we're heading to 10 billion people.
India, China and Africa's emissions expansion over the coming decades guarantee that if the popular climate scientist claims are correct, there is only a dire outcome possible at this point. You can take the developed countries to zero and the world (as we know it) still ends the same.
The developed countries - which it's important to note are a small, nearly contracting minority share of global population - are never going to zero (much less negative). So the realistic scenario is actually far worse than any fantasy zero scenario would indicate.
Just China and India alone will be enough to destroy the planet when it comes to emissions. In the next three decades, their emissions will not contract, they will expand massively. The developed countries as a whole will struggle to significantly reduce their emissions from where they are now. And that's that, the end.
Everything else about how developed nations should immediately cut back while eg China pushes the planet off a cliff, is nothing more than virtue signaling on the way to the graveyard.
And if you ask the virtue signalers for math to show how China can keep rapidly expanding its emissions and everything is going to work out fine, they will immediately turn tail and run away as fast as they can, or otherwise desperately change the subject. I've been trying for years to get anyone to demonstrate how China can continue to expand so fast that it ends up having 3x or 4x the emissions of the US, and how that can be defeated as a problem. Nobody dares to engage the actual conversation, because they know what it means, they know the virtue signaling premise (the world can still be saved, if only the developed countries fall on the sword) is a giant lie.
The virtue signaling fake-save-the-world-go-to-zero premise is so laughably absurd at this point, that what we're going to see next will be extraordinary fantasy elements come into play. They'll start talking about increasingly dumb solutions, like that we'll magically warp China's emissions away using quantum AI buzz-word buzz-word buzz-word technology (and we'll do it within just a few decades). The years will keep sliding by, China's emissions will keep soaring higher, the save-the-world fantasy ideas will keep getting dumber.
If the climate scientists are right, the outcome is already set, short of utilizing a fantasy premise to get to zero or negative net for the entire globe very rapidly (none of which is feasible).
A wildly optimistic outcome would be for the developed nations overall to cut emissions by 1/3 in the next ~30 years. That's not going to happen, but let's do a little bit of pretending for fun. China is set to fill that in all by itself over those decades. Now add in the rest of the developing world and three billion additional people hungry for an affluent lifestyle.
But one might say: I'm not proposing any solutions! That's right, there aren't any. Unless China can be convinced (they can't be, see: coal power plant construction) to immediately stop its emissions climb, while everybody else in the developing world also immediately gives up chasing a first world lifestyle (which I also don't fault them for in the least, they should pursue that) and combined with somehow that magically the developed world instantly slashes its emissions output by an impossible amount in the span of a few decades. All of those things has to happen, you need three fantasy outcomes to happen simultaneously to avoid the dire outcome.
Unlike the climate hypocrites on both sides, I'm not asking the developing nations to not seek a developed lifestyle (as a solution). I'm not saying they should fall on the sword either. I'm not asking them to want anything less than what developed nations want. I'm recognizing reality for what it is: there is no positive outcome possible, if the climate scientists are right about their increasingly dire models.
I don't understand this. Your claim is that it's literally impossible to complete industrialization with non-polluting technologies? Why? Is there something inherent to the energy that fossil fuels provide beyond their cost and ease of access?
> they know the virtue signaling premise (the world can still be saved, if only the developed countries fall on the sword) is a giant lie.
If it's cost alone, the answer is straightforward, especially as your premise already includes the developed world "falling on its sword": countries that polluted their way through industrialization heavily subsidize the clean version of that economic process in countries that have yet to do so.
This is obviously devilishly complicated from a geopolitical perspective, and I'm not necessarily recommending it. But the idea that the developed world has no levers to pull here is nonsense.
If it comes to it, if we overcome the greedy capitalist and nationalistic, imperialistic hangups, we could do it at cost in our best self interest to educate and industrialize the global south cleanly. Prevents war there, poverty, hunger and all sorts of refugee problems.
With their own hands, them owning the fruits of their labor.
My optimistic side agree with you but my inner cynic thinks that’s equivalent to saying “if we just get past our human hangups we could do it”. While being technically true, it’s hard to see a likely path given the current state of human affairs.
Twitter would also stop being a cesspool and start betting a forum of enlightened discourse if we could just put aside out psychological flaws but I’m not holding my breath for that, either.
> It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels.
There is one scenario, which isn’t probable. That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight. After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
>After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
Largely the entire globe has benefited from the industrial revolution. If the west is obligated to pay a retrospective sin tax, does the west also then jack up the prices on every technology that comes from that development when exporting to developing countries? For example, should students from developing countries get to come to the US and learn the latest knowledge and take that home and then jumping their country forward through decades of technology research? Should every immigrant into western countries pay huge fees to buy into the modern world, since they are not descended from those who are paying the sin taxes?
Also, do these sin taxes require that developing countries that receive these fund then guarantee not to emit CO2?
I disagree. Imagine everything that goes into the manufacture of an Apple M1 SoC. You have to get the raw materials, the design tools, the invention of the transistor, likely hundreds of thousands of hours, if not millions of hours, of engineering time to go from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to fab design, to computer science, to chip design, etc. Sure, if you isolate just the inventions along the path from the invention of fire to Apple selling their M1 based systems, it seems modest. But you can't just arbitrarily claim that X invention happened in the absence of the world in which it was invented.
During the industrial revolution there were no clean alternatives and there wasn't a clear understanding of the consequences. While indirect, modern developing nations greatly benefit from the existence of modern technologies developed by those who have already gone through this, and they are capable of learning from the mistakes of the west.
I really think the idea, that as a species, we need to redo the entirety of the industrial revolution individually for every nation is completely ridiculous. It would be one thing if it was contextualized as just infrastructure ramp up, but that's not the reality of this. (also why is China, the worlds second largest economy, always bundled in with developing nations?)
> That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight
This line of thought is doomed for failure, geopolitical "oversight" doesn't mean anything, that money won't go to productive climate action programs, no matter how much people want them too. In my mind the only pragmatic way the west can influence developing nations CO2 output is by subsidizing clean energy technologies to be more competitive in an international market, or at least something to that effect.
Western countries can use some of the wealth they made by getting us into this situation in the first place [1] to pay for green energy projects in developing countries, so developing countries can develop without having to go the same massive CO2 emitting route that Western countries took.
[1] CO2 stays in the atmosphere for several hundred years or more. The US is the source of 25% of what is in there now, and the EU-28 another 22%.
Wealth is not gobs of gold that Western countries sit on. Wealth is the ability to produce energy and turn it into creature's comforts, on a massive scale.
There is no development without massive growth in energy consumption. Please point to a single developed country on this Earth that has CO2 emissions per capita smaller than what Paris accords call for, which, depending on the source, is somewhere between 1.5-2.5 CO2 t/year/capita.
To limit emissions all countries must converge to a low energy lifestyle. There is no more developing for poor countries, and there is harsh un-developing for erst rich countries.
then Western countries subsidizing developing countries sustainable energy should be on the table. If it is purely to stop climate change, and western countries have unfairly exploited the world for centuries, then they should share a larger portion of the burden of a solution
I think this is one thing that frustrates me about these conversations, they are still very Americentric. What matters is that we reduce atmospheric CO2. Every major country has the technical and economic means to invest and innovate on clean technology and CCS systems (because honestly we need negative production of CO2, not zero). You can't just rely on America to save everyone on the planet. I don't care if it comes from China, Germany, France, Australia, India, or wherever. It just matters that it gets done. We already know who's to blame. It's like a fire that's started and we're arguing about who's job it is to put out. This isn't spilt milk. The longer we wait the more damage is done and with compounding interest. We can talk about blame and solve the issue but this can't just dominate the conversation. Everyone needs to fix the issue. Full stop. This is because everyone is in danger.
I don't think the suggestion is that developing countries should get to pollute their way into modernity the way the West did. As you point out, the planet won't care whether the extra pollution comes from a place of historical "fairness". But acknowledgement of the fairness element here does imply a straightforward (though far from simple) solution: massive transfers from those who've already dumped their pollutants into the atmosphere to those who are still in the development phase where they need to. Ignoring geopolitical realities and playing the global benevolent optimizer for a minute, this is a pretty clear-cut way to make sure that the externalities and benefits of pollution-driven development are borne evenly, while not ignoring the realities of the planet's response to pollution.
I'm not necessarily endorsing this policy. Just pointing out that the dichotomy you're setting up is a false one.
> If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be on preventing that to happen rather than Monday morning quarterbacking the last 100 years of industrialization?
You have more responsibility for what you have agency to actually do. We have more ability to lower our emissions than to lower China's.
Beyond that, per-capita they still emit much less and may naturally level off to a level similar to ours depending on coal/gas mix in generation, etc. We don't need to focus only on right handed people's emissions just because left-handed people only emit 10% as much carbon in aggregate. Can you imagine a big campaign saying left-handed people should do anything they want, dump CFCs into the air etc., until right-handed people get their act together and achieve less or equal overall impact as left-handed people, and that only then it is ok to consider left-handed people?
> It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries
In my experience it's more about justifying the continued unfettered use of fossil fuels to drive progress in developing nations. Sure, it sounds like 1st world blaming, but I think it's more about defending the right of poorer peoples to advance their standard of living in the near term.
I'm not agreeing with it or defending it, but when I've encountered it in real life that is how it came across.
Going carbon negative unfortunately for us is very energy intensive. (The pie in the sky chemical ways to attack it such as simulating geology are likely bunk or too slow.)
So intensive that we could be lacking even uranium to do it in a century barring some huge discoveries (biotech, or maybe nanotechnology) or improvements in fusion power.
Can't do it on renewables in the reasonable timeframe - we don't have the production for it and that scale of production will certainly output more GHG.
So yeah, it's a bit hard to attack. Surviving the warming is just as tricky.
Current CCS rates are about $60/ton. Given that each PPM represents about 8 billion tons of atmospheric CO2, that's $480B for each PPM reduction. Obviously not great.
But what if that number drops to $30 per ton? $10? If we get the best minds in the world on it, it might be possible. At $10, a $1T investment takes us down 12.5 ppm. That's five years worth of emissions.
It's a monstrous challenge. But it's not completely unimaginable.
Followup. Your comment gave me a crazy idea. I've now thought about it enough to share.
To incentivize carbon removal, the US Treasury commits to spending 10 megabucks per year to buy carbon bricks synthesized via CCS.
Brick price is 10 megabucks / number produced.
Starting spot price (ceiling) is for bricks is somehow determined. Plus whatever sane market rules are deemed appropriate.
The provenance of these bricks is easily confirmed. By some combo of isotopes, inspections, and affidavits. So that sellers can't easily use non-atmospheric carbon.
Some kind of practical form factor is determined for the carbon bricks.
Carbon bricks become yet another currency.
--
Said another way:
US Treasury mints gold coins from gold bullion.
Compute farms mint bitcoin from electricity.
Carbon scrubbers will mint carbon bricks from atmospheric carbon.
Whereas bitcoin is inflationary, bricks are deflationary. Like US dollars.
Harness the Cobra Effect. Since all bricks produced will be bought, more production is incentivized.
Another aspect of this is that it could maybe exploit modern monetary policy. Price of bricks getting too high? Maybe 'ease' a few more into circulation by buying them with new dollars.
It is not all or nothing, and we are past several points of no-return. All of the countries need to act 10 years ago, 'but Bobby is peeing in the pool more than I do' is not going to cut it. It is stupid, misleading, and counter-productive.
How about this? All developing countries would welcome the "developed" nation's Trillion Dollar investments in future sustainability as an act of taking accountability for how they exploited other nations.
Per capita emissions from the US are still ludicrously high when compared to developing countries. Not a single one of those western countries is taking accountability for what they did and exploited over the last 2 centuries. If western countries really cared then they already would've worked with developing countries long time ago and they still can i.e. if they cared.
I'm not saying that developing countries should be allowed to do the same, but this "pointing out the data" indicates more towards "developing nation's work is done here, now we'll stay the same as it is and others do all the work" rather co-operation in my opinion.
>This is the problem I have with people who claim to care about the catastrophic impact of climate change. It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries than it is about actually working to reduce the CO2 in the environment. If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be one preventing that to happen?
Here is a better idea.
How about developed nations, with their might of research, resources and human capital, put aside economic growth for a while and steer the world towards a sustainable future.
Its not about moral victories.
The approach of developed nations has been wrong. You see people like Trump and lose all hope for humanity.
There is only so much a developing country can do when you have scenarios where India has 4 times the population of USA, yet per capita Carbon production is 7 times less.
Still, it is the developing nations who have been most successful in meeting climate targets, be it in renewable energy or reduction in per capita carbon generation.
Sure, I like to whine and point out the moral failures of the developed world, but it is rightly deserved so. Because developing countries also act on climate change, in spite of knowing the effects it has on their economies.
But god forbid angering an American voter by talking about being responsible for climate change.
The data shows that Western world growth reduces CO2 on both per capita and absolute levels. As things renew and develop they are cleaner and more efficient. I’m not sure why you’d want to stop that, unless you care more about moral victories than climate change itself.
In fact it's just plain wrong to divide the world this way between 'developed' and 'developing'. There is no inherent progress towards 'development' and no natural staging of these things towards lower CO2 emissions or advancement generally. The reality is that the world economy is combined and uneven.
Environmental laws and protections put in place in western countries are one of the many things that leads to the wholesale export of industries into places where regulations are laxer or unenforced. The dirty work is sent elsewhere.
Considered as a whole, there is no "third wave" economy, and mass industrialism has never left us. The world's industrial working class is larger than it has ever been. Industrial production is bigger than it's ever been. Industrial pollution is larger than it has ever been, by far. And all of this is tied into a world economy facilitated by global trade.
This should be entirely obvious to people who work in a tech sector where almost all hardware is produced in China.
So it is nonsense to try to divide responsibilities between "developed" and the "developing" world. The whole world continues to be "developing."
And the distribution of wealth itself isn't close to even either, there are areas within the "developed" world that look very similar to the "undeveloped" or "developing" world in terms of living standards.
This didn't happen purely because Western countries became more aware of their impact on the environment. As countries develop, their population growth rate slows. Their technology improves and they can spend energy more efficiently.
In the US's case, there was a large gain from switching from coal to natural gas for power generation. Not because it was better environmentally, but because it was cheaper. It's disingenuous for the US to go "Look at all we've done" when half the country is in firm denial that there's even a problem.
> They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living.
Mainly because they haven't tried. It simply wasn't a priority or necessity.
But looking forward, there's two options: (1) we invent new technology to sustain a high-energy civilisation - the only realistic scenario is that this invention comes from the developed world; (2) we revert to low-energy (pre 20th century) civilization.
When looking at the delayed and cost overruns of the California high speed rail, and the slow adoption solar and wind on the west coast USA, and the slow development of batter technology, and the reverted carbon tax in Australia. I would say we very much tried (1) and failed. In particular I would say politicians failed us because they were too busy handing out favorable legislation for the wealthy class, who very much relied on business as usual to keep their wealth growing.
I hold no hope that a new technology will save us, while the politicians act this way. Remember that the White house used to have solar water heaters, but they were removed under Regan.
You're trying to turn a practical problem into a moral problem. Blaming the United States' (or anyone else's) past involvement is only useful insofar as it reduces CO2.
Well, kind of. From their point of view, it sounds a bit like: "I got there first and I industrialized and got rich, oh, by the way, I made you give up resources I needed for that, for free or at reduced prices, through gunboat diplomacy or outright conquest. You don't get to do the same because you were slow (even better, actively stopped from doing so in many cases)".
Nuclear is more dense, but much more difficult. But generally yes, the density of hydrocarbons for their application is unbeatable and will continue to be until we find something else.
This is true, but also so what? I’m serious. So what? What’s your point? Fuck all y’all I want burn coal because you did? What’s next? Demanding to play with gasoline and open flames, because someone else did?
This is childish behavior that focuses more on trying to trying to score some sort of shame points rather than say… survival. I hate[+] to be the one tell you, but those very people you think you’re supporting, are the very ones least capable of protecting themselves from climate disruption.
Now that we know, it is better to help the next generation live better without giving a pass because “that’s not fair, you got to do it” which is more akin to children’s logic.
Both China and India are nuclear powers with massive industrial bases, high technology and advanced militaries. Especially China.
The "hobbit perspective" of ignoring the problem won't work. If China ends up in a lot of pain due to climate change, EVERYONE will feel their pain. They won't lie down and take it, and if that means pushing others down so they can stay up, they'll do it no questions asked.
When we're all under water and biodiversity drops like in the Permian extinction, will it matter if "they did it first"/"we were right - they were wrong"?
It seems like western countries are penalized for having birthrates and population under control when the "per capita" emissions numbers are used, vs absolute output (which is declining in West).
China and soon India are the two countries that make me feel hopeless about controlling CO2. I get that's not "fair", but the planet doesn't care about fairness.
No they are not. Birth rates have declined in India and China as well. However, all those people have to live ssomewhere. So, per capita emissions are more than fair and accurate. If that is not the right way to look at it then how about the US (second highest level of total CO2 emissions behind China) reduce it to the level of, say, Lichtenstein.
The planet may not care about fariness, but developed countries can do.
As a compensation for years of above average pollution, let them spend some decades in negative pollution (removing carbon from the atmosphere) to offset for all the suffering they have caused.
I am worried about China too, but as an Indian, I can assure you that everyone in India is climate conscious and the govt. is doing its best to reach its pledges and targets.
Statistically, China is leading the world in solar installations and EV car sales. Admittedly sales figures don't always align with political will/intent, but China seems pretty far along the path towards controlling CO2 adjusting for how much of their footprint is externalized carbon from producing goods for the West, and the "bootstrap factor" that they are on a far faster growth/adoption curve overall than most of the West.
For what it is worth, politically on the record, China has some very strong goals stated, and those installation/sales statistics indicate some aggression towards meeting them.
I think a lot of the worry about China is misplaced for one reason or another. (Especially with the shell game of especially US politics outsourcing so much industrial work to China and then directly blaming China for emissions that should rightfully be accounted for in US corporation bottom lines and blaming China for the outsourcing in the first place as if it weren't done precisely because of that carbon emissions shell game and the gross [fig., lol] profits on the bottom line.)
India seems to be one of the countries with most to lose from climate change. If the wheat growing belt migrates north sufficiently - as it may - India will have enormous problems feeding itself.
Problem is not with the belt, problem is with water storage (aka snow caps) in Himalayas. If they are gone, then desertification and mass starvation is pretty much assured
Developed nations have polluted the planet for decades, with highest rates of energy consumption per capita. They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living. They have lived their excess and now lecture the world that their "90% of emissions are from consumption"
One group of people have taken the world for granted. Now want everyone else to bear the cost. Typical.