Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented if they lifted restrictions on AC so that they can feel good about making a negligible effect on carbon emissions. So I think you have it opposite, how much pain do rich countries have to endure before they realize that their efforts are in vain.

And before you say "that's because the West outsources all the dirty production to China", even trade adjusted emissions are down considerably and continue to be down.

Please do some research if you're interested in this topic, it's not hard to do. Just follow the logical steps.

1. What causes global warming

2. Who produces most of these chemicals

3. Are there any global trends over the last 20 years in production of these chemicals

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-crusade-against-air-co...

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.

To avoid their country having large regions become uninhabitable?

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?

And also we should be helping them.

India is working hard to get that down. It's a much more tangible and immediate problem there than the thought some parts of the country may become so hot as to be unliveable. Addressing thst, in India, is a side effect / a benefit of cleaning up the air, as much as energy autarky via Solar PV has the benefit of becoming independent of oil imports. India has coal. Lots of it. It's cheap to them. It doesn't particularly want to use more of it because of the associated air pollution and also because cooling water for thermal power plants competes with drinking water for people in some places.

Personally I think India is rather pragmatic here. Battery banks for scooters in the cities? tick. Buildout of PV? tick. Electric car charging stations? tick. Replacing wood, coal and other dirty cooking fuel by gas? Also tick. India just doesn't bother fighting some internal culture wars about how great fossil fuels or renewables are. They just move ahead more or less silently.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Despite higher carbon intensity (for now), they still emit less Co2 per person on electricity than the US (because they need/use less).

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.

If you want a fair comparison, I would suggest looking at countries in similar economical positions (good growth, but still playing catch-up with wealthy nations) and with big coal reserves (France never really had enough in the first place, which is why going "full coal" instead of full nuclear was not even an option).

Two very good examples would be pre-1980 Germany or Poland a few decades ago, and both of those were very reliant on coal for electricity as well (even Spain was at ~40% coal for power up into the 1990s).

If you want a country with less than China's GDP per capita, how about Ukraine?

Moreover, you keep talking dispatchable power, but nothing needs that to be 60% of total generation. Daytime load is generally around twice nighttime load. That implies something like two thirds of total generation is baseload (i.e. 50% of peak load for 100% of the day), and can use nuclear for anything up to that entire amount. Only one third needs to be dispatchable/intermittent, for which you can use renewables on most days and cover the large majority of that. You should only need coal/gas/hydro/storage on days when renewable generation is low -- which should be less than half of that one third, not 60% of all generation. China has enough for that in just hydro already, but then they're burning coal anyway.

Looking at CO2 per kWh (a much better metric if you want to boil country comparisons down to a single number) you will find that they are not doing significantly worse than most nations in their weight-class (GDP wise), and in fact doing better than quite a few.

Australia, South Africa, Poland, India, Indonesia and basically all of the middle east is doing worse than them. Even rich nations with heavy renewable commitments like Germany are barely 40% lower, and this is frequently negated by higher per-capita electricity use (like it is with the US).

In my view, not many wealthy western nations are actually in a position where they can demand significant improvements from China in this metric without getting laughed at (except France, Scandinavia, Spain). If you look at nations with more than twice the GDP per capita (and a headstart in development) it is more than reasonable to demand that they be at least below 50% of (current) Chinese CO2 intensity (in my view).

I strongly believe that we see so few actual demands in this regard (and so little progress in more direct CO2 taxation schemes) because most nations realize that they live in a figurative glass house. E.g. if the whole EU was at french emission levels, we'd be much more likely to see import tariffs linked to metrics like this, effecting improvement all over the world. Pointing the fingers at China on the other hand is neither accurate nor effective.

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.

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.

My friend, they're building the most nuclear and solar in the world... And yes, coal too. The US right now is actively trying to block renewables (at the federal level at least)

As to fuel economy, the US is the only country where 40 MPG for a hybrid might be brought up as a win. It's just all big inefficient cars over there. You can look up how much the car industry in the US fights increasing fuel economy standards.

This is not because most of those trucks are used by some business, this is because people like to drive around in them.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

The US grid is 18% nuclear, 10% wind and 6% solar. China is 5% nuclear, 9% wind and 6% solar.

The UK is 34% wind+solar. Uruguay Greece, Spain and Germany are all >=40% wind+solar. Lithuania and Denmark are >50% wind+solar.

How is it that nuclear, wind and solar can handle a higher percentage of the grid in all of these other countries?

> 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

The only thing Trump wants is to shore up votes in coal-producing swing states for the midterms. He's going to slightly delay the shuttering of some coal fired power plants that are just going to close anyway for a ridiculous and purely political reason and the real-world consequences of it are going to be negligible, because this:

> 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.

And not only that, renewables are now the cheapest form of new generation until the grid gets above something like 40% renewables and you have to start actually doing something about the intermittency. Neither the US nor China have that much yet and in neither case do they need the percentage of fossil fuels that they currently have.

But the argument for continuing to operate existing plants is that you still need electricity while building new renewables. The argument for replacing coal plants with natural gas is that conversions are cheaper than new plants and natural gas is better than coal. There is no argument for building new coal when your grid is <40% renewables -- just build new renewables.

> Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage

Then why is their number lower than the US one, never mind countries in Europe?

> 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.

The US is covered in 100+kV transmission lines. Even higher voltage transmission lines have lower losses, but you're talking about going from a single digit percentage to a lower single digit percentage. It's basically a cost trade off between building all new transmission towers or using the same money to build slightly more renewable generation capacity -- and the latter benefits you more on the normal days when you're not trying to supply power to someone hundreds of miles away and can just use the extra power locally.

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.

On the plus side, we're going to have many fewer people in 50 years, which will lead to correspondingly less CO2 emissions.

Our economies are built on oil burning somewhere else in the world. You can try to point the blame at China, but the wealth generated in the middle east selling them oil is a major part of the reason why US stock markets keep going up.

If you forced China to use less fossil fuels you would personally feel a much larger hit to your quality of life.

We in the developed world love to outsource the violence and environmental damage we cause. It's one thing to wash your hands, but quite another to then try to point the finger.

Renewables are cheaper than coal and oil energy, so we will see an increase in quality of life as China electrifies, at least for those of us that import Chinese manufactured goods.

Oil is mostly for people's cars, for an unsustainable transit system that locks us in little boxes and kills all our salmon and is one of the greatest threats to the lives of our children. Getting rid of oil and coal is going to be a loooot easier than getting rid of our car infrastructure.

America imports more from Mexico, Canada, and the EU than China which ranks as #4 when you consider EU as a single entity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Imports from China are a small fraction of GDP and offset by exports to other countries. OECD countries are largely exporting labor not the kind of heavy industry associated with heavy CO2 emissions. Which makes sense as China has relatively cheap labor, but they don’t get a discount on Oil.

Do you want to take a wild guess as to which country is a top 3 importer to all of these countries/regions?

Here's a clue: it's the same country that is a major exporter of oil from GCC countries, and the wealth from those GCC countries is a major contributor of investment to US industry/financial sector.

The correct answer, is of course: China

The global is economy is very tightly interconnected and still very much driven by oil and fossil fuels in general. You can do all the accounting tricks you want, but developed Western lifestyles, especially in the US, are entirely supported and made possible by growing global fossil fuel usage.

Canada imports 377 Billion from America and only 88 Billion from China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

So you clearly don’t actually understand global trade if you think being top 3 trading partner somehow drastically changes the equation here. China is a massive economy with 1/6th of the worlds population and a top 3 economy, so yes it does a lot of trade but economies are a lot more than just trade.

For example the US's top product imported from Mexico are vehicles, electrical equipment and machinery. But those things are assembled from parts produced in China. So if you reduce China's use of energy you not only impact the direct trade that we benefit from but also the indirect trade.

And you still haven't addressed the way the global financial system is so tightly interconnected. GCC countries invest an estimated $1 trillion in the US, but a large chunk of that wealth comes from oil being sold to Asia, with China being one of the major purchasers.

The point stands that you can't meaningfully disconnect US energy usage from Chinese energy usage. If, for example, we were to stop GCC export to China (and not sell that oil in order to fight climate change) the US economy would ultimately collapse (this is in fact one of the major strategic levers that Iran has right now).

88B can’t be a particularly large part of 377B even before you consider that 88B is largely used domestically not for exports to the US and Canada also exports to China.

Fundamentally something that costs 1$ can’t require more than 1$ of fossil fuels to produce without someone losing money on the transaction. Most goods do embody some carbon, but US agricultural goods being exported actually embody a much larger fraction of CO2 than most goods due to the nature of farming and the vast agricultural subsidies. This alone offsets the trade imbalance rendering US trade very close to carbon neutral.

As to your specific point, product from Canada, Mexico etc, may have parts from China. But Canada isn’t simply redirecting 100% of its Chinese imports to the US. Further Canada, Mexico, and the EU and the US are also exporting goods to China directly and indirectly.

Again, calculate the actual CO2 involved trade with China is basically irrelevant from a CO2 perspective relative to domestic emissions.

> global financial system is so tightly interconnected

We’re talking actual emissions which sums to 100% of global emissions. The environment doesn’t somehow double count pollution because it’s the result of the financial system. Thus the impact of the global financial system and everything else is already being accounted for.

Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions is harder than production-based accounting, but it allows us to see more clearly what the CO2 cost of our lifestyle is. It's been ~5 years since I looked at one of those in detail, but I don't think it's changed much since then. The big takeaway for me was that for the US, which has massive emissions compared to Europe countries, urban/suburban design and land use was by far the biggest determinant of CO2 consumption, followed by income/wealth. Despite their higher wealth and ability to spend more, residents of urban areas have for lower emissions than suburban residents.

See, for example, https://coolclimate.org/maps

There's a tendency to think of consumption in zero-sum terms, but it turns out that energy efficiency has a massive impact on emissions, and also that intuition about quantities of emissions is really hard to gain without a lot of study.

OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.

> and continue to do so

China's emissions declined last year. The US's increased.

> It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries.

China used their emissions to make solar and batteries the cheapest source of electricity today.

China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014, if I remember correctly. It's totally fair to blame industrialised countries for their share in causing global warming, irrespective if that happened in the early days of industrialisation and was propped up by dirty energy sources. Though, it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources.

Not yet according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-....

> it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources

Developed countries should subsidize their use of cleaner energy sources. That balances things out, morally speaking.

But, if anything, energy efficiency standards for new construction are so strict that heat is becoming less of a problem.

Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?

Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation?

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766

Maybe because the majority of Europe is closer to Canada, latitude-wise, than to Phoenix, AZ, and there is simply less demand? Less wealth is certainly a factor, too, especially considering how the warmest nations in Europe all tend to be weaker economically.

> Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?

Maybe its just the higher life expectancy increasing susceptibility? Everyone has to die of something at some point.

Ah yes, heat death, essentially "natural causes". Never mind what's obviously in front of your face.

No healthy person all of a sudden dies from heat, I am sorry to tell. If that would be the case, everyone would be as panicked as you are. Europe has comparatively older demographics. Heat risk mainly affects infants and the elderly.

Most EU countries have free health care, so even people not caring enough for themselves will have a comparatively higher chance to survive into an old age. But also those who didn't die because of a bad lifestyle are part of this demographic. Like I said, treacherous, because you should look at this demographic and start to ask how many hours of life expectancy is lost. Healthcare keeps finding that the elder people just don't drink enough during these warm days.

I guess that if you want to win back these hours, you have to convince those elderly people to install AC or get them to drink enough during hot days. At this age people have a certain flexibility of mind, complicated by the fact that heat waves these days are really more severe than in their lived past.

Let me assure you: if people think it is too hot for them at home and they don't see an alternative, they will install AC. It is affordable enough. But there might be a cultural difference, people don't think of AC as the first line of defense against the hot days. Environmental awareness is higher; AC's contribute to global warming. Anecdotally, looking around I see there is a preference for sun protection over AC's.

Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.

Should be simple

Doesn't that mean that they would need AC, then? At least for those specific buildings.

However, as a European living in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world, I only feel the need for AC like 2-3 weeks a year. I think the issue is that most people dying of heath are already very old and much more sensitive to it.

But if you live in any kind of share building, you can't just go and set up a split. If it is outside the building, you need permits, both from the architects, so that you don't deface your ugly concrete building, and from your fellow residents, who usually vote "no" by default.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-fuel-demand-m...

And this recent assessment puts emissions from China at "flat or falling" for the past 21 months:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

It's like you're on a boat that sprung a leak and everyone grabs a bucket. But a few people choose to not help because it's not fair for whatever reason.

And yes, the objective is to stop using fossil fuels. That's not exactly a secret agenda, it's the whole fucking point.

Seriously, there is no debate with this rethoric.

You didn't answer either of my questions. Even though I asked first.

Yawn. "Both sides are equally valid" is a tired argument. Truth and lies are not the same.

I'd argue everyone should have an AC if they need one (probably China needs more than they have.) But we shouldn't build any more fossil fuel extraction, people who need AC should figure out how to do it with batteries and renewable energy. (Nuclear is fine, if it makes sense economically.) We don't need population control, we just need to add sufficiently large taxes on things we want less of. AC isn't a thing we want less of, it's carbon emissions.

It's not. Many/most people who live in developed countries live lifestyles which use outsized amounts of resources and put lots of carbon into the atmosphere. They're also well-positioned to use their wealth to stop doing that.

>A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.

Not exactly from people who live a wealthy life in the west. More educated people in general are more likely to understand the complicated issue of climate change. Wealth and education have a close relationship.

>I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable.

If multiple nations collaborating is your definition of one world government then okay, but no it wouldn't lead to that lol. What?

>But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.

I sorta agree that that's the wrong approach. The issue here is generally large industrial producers and corporations who produce most of the carbon. That said, they are responding to demand from consumers, so attacking demand is a valid way to approach the problem.

Two Americans and ten Chinese are on a lifeboat. The Americans are each eating two sandwiches a day and the Chinese are eating one. Supplies are low. You do the math and note that the Chinese sure are eating a lot of sandwiches.

Chinese emissions have peaked and are now falling.

Please stop lying. It hasn't cumulatively emitted as much as the OECD [1], and cumulative emissions are the cause of our current predicament.

It's also doing the opposite of growing.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

They did, last year.

Please don’t repeat this anti-Europe myth. Anyone applying a bit of common sense should realize how improbable that claim is.

China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...

[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...

Which restrictions on AC? I know that Europeans don't use AC as much as the US because of a mixture of historical and cultural reasons, but I wasn't aware of any restrictions. What prevents someone in Europe from buying and installing an AC unit in their own home?

What usually happens, is that most people live in cities. And in cities, they have to get a permit from the HOA and from the city, lest the outside unit deface some historically significant square concrete building (yeah, I know there are actually historically significant buildings, ugly concrete ones built after 1950 aren't among them, though they're where the majority of the people live).

Any idea what percentage of this reduction is due to offshoring manufacturing?

> https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Where in Europe are ACs restricted because of carbon emissions? Even in France with very strong building codes (you can't just plop an AC on your own, you need approvals), ACs are the standard in the south where they are needed for long periods of the year.

What restrictions are there on AC?

The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning

There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations

90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.

Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).

And 27C is a completely normal temperature. When it's 35C outside, you're better off with a minimised thermal shock with a small difference, instead of going at it the US South or Dubai style where inside it's 18C, so all everyone does is move from one air conditioned place to another (home to car to office to car to mall to home).

Your mentions PUBLIC building policies are irrelevant

So any emission reduction done by developed countries is offset by China.

The quote from your link:

> China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole

So, increase of 4.7% and then (likely) decrease of 0.3% is a great progress?

I would rather wait for official IEA data before claiming victory: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions

As for PRC, they brrrted out enough solar last year to replace about 40 billion barrels of oil over their life time, or about annual global consumption of oil @100m barrels per day. They have enough renewable manufacturing capacity to displace global oil, lng and good chunk of coal.

PRC is basically manufacturing the largest carbon displacement, i.e. emission avoidance system in the world, and if not for them, global fossil consumption would double+.

It's even more retarded accounting that taxes PRC manufacturing renewables as generation emissions while fossils extractors, i.e. US whose massively increased oil/lng exports do not count towards US emissions.

At the end of the day, PRC's balance of emissions vs how much they displace via renewable manufacturing makes their emission contribution net negative, by a large margin. OCED countries reducing their emissions don't even compare in terms of contribution, it's borderline performative. OCED need to be reducing emissions and generating equivalent displacement to be net negative. It doesn't have to be domestic net negative, simply export/fund enough renewables to developing countries whose power consumption and downstream emissions will increase by magnitudes... you know subsidize them like OECD was suppose to do. Reality is rich countries don't want to do shit about the "global" emission problem, at least PRC selling renewables at commodity pricing to displace velocity of fossil consumption increase. Ultimately, 4 billion developing people going to 10/100x their energy consumption, which like AC is net moral good over net emissions. The real battle is how to keep new power use as emission free as possible, and only PRC is doing that in numbers that matter.

Wanking over OCED reducing their emissions is overlooking OCED was suppose to help developing countries minimize (not reduce) as they grow. All OCED has to do is give PRC renewables the 100b they once pledged on to help developing countries transition for PRC to run renewables manufacturing at 100% utilization (or even expand) so significant % of new power generation is renewables. 100b at current PRC prices of $0.1O/watt buys about 1000GW of panels (enough to power all of Africa & India and more). Or OECD can manufacture at sell at/below cost themselves.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can to make our local environment better and protect and Preserve what we have. We absolutely should. I'm just stating that this is not the first time the Earth has heated or cooled and nothing that we do will ultimately stop it from this cycle from continuing.

For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.

Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.

Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.

Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.

And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.

That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.

By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.

Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.

The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.

There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.

There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.

If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.

Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.

I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.

I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.

Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.

Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.

US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.

First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.

Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.

Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.

I think the level of tolerance US has for marginally stable autocracies with nuclear weapons has receded permanently.

Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.

Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.

Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)

And you think a second, much larger Syrian refugee migration will have 0 impact on France?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything and everyone is connected.

If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?

https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...

We sink the boats.

Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.

You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.

As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...

I guess I’m not someone, because I’m still open on whether Trump is a pedophile. (I don’t think he is. I’m open to being proven wrong.)

> the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any

We don’t know this. And we don’t know how those outside his base on whose votes he and his Congress depend would react.

From his own FBI department a few days ago. Federal court already found him liable for rape of Jean Carrol. Why are you giving this man any benefit of the doubt when he quacks like a rapist pedophile?

Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).

There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.

This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.

The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.

How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?

They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.

It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?

industry, transport and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.

(another way of splitting it says electricity, industry, heating, and transport are roughly almost 25% each. It depends whether you count electricity on its own or bundle it with how its used)

But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes. (or alternatives to carbon taxes, which are worse)

I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)

About 9 times higher.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...

Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?

Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???

> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation

You're drawing (or seem to be) a causal link from climate change to this specific drought/war.

Climate change is a statistical anomaly that cannot be seen in individual events.

Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?

Nothing will change until many of the global electorate stop burying their heads in the sand. These people don't change their minds until things affect them specifically. Then they change their mind, and all their former fellows tell them they're brainwashed.

This doesn't change until nearly everyone is affected, and by then we're so far into the catastrophe that the consequences don't even bear thinking about.

"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.

So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.

There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.

IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.

But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).

This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.

Can't win elections when gas is expensive. I still remember the "I did that" stickers at gas pumps.

Biden also signed the largest climate change bill in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Energy...

When voters are heavily propagandized it's an uphill battle to keep fossil fuels cheap, so you can win elections and phase out those same cheap fuels.

Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.

If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.

We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.

There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.

- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions

- live far away from their workplace

- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating

will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-study-calculated-t...

You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.

It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.

Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.

It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.

Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.

No it's not. There's a large group of people whose pockets are being lined by it. A large group of billionaires.

People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.

The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.

Not sure how we fix that either.

Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.

We need some mechanism that penalizes polluters, benefits low emitters, and stops/limits/taxes/... worldwide shipping when local alternatives are available to avoid these [1] abominations.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1e4zl...

I think the truth is we won’t really take this seriously globally until the changes are so severe that it’ll take generations to undo if ever.

Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice. At least if you care about root of the problems and not just venting off. I am not offering a solution to educating half of US population which clearly doesn't care about facts, or lacks any basic moral compass... I don't have a practical solution.

US 'special' form of voted democracy failed and failed hard, lets see how far this gets in next 3 years and if any actual lessons learned happen afterwards (I don't hold my breath since reality doesn't behave just because it would be nice and viable time to act is gone I think).

Thrice actually

It's obviously someone else's problem if that someone refuses to accept there's a climate catastrophe.

Voting is literally the only way to solve this. Nothing will happen without legislation to force the hand of greedy corps.

Maybe spend your energy trying to convince climate deniers to vote differently.

Corps aren't the problm. They only respond to demands of their customers.

Instead, they just blame the electorate. The electorate just responds to demand. Same as industry. Stop buying beef there will be no beef industry. Stop buying cars there will be no car industry. Stop buying things from the other side of the world there will be no shipping industry.

People keep expecting politicians to somehow magically do something but are usually unwilling to do anything more than separate their trash or once in a while, bring a bag to the grocery store they just drove too.

Yea, all of that is hard. But if you're not willing to do it, what makes you think the electorate could possibly pass anything no of their constituents is willing to do?

Made a shitload of sacrifices, how about you?

Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.

This is deflecting the problem. All of those are in response to demand. People live in suburbs instead of centrally so they need all their own personal transportation and product transportation. They want all their clothing, toys, BBQs, lawn chairs, smokers, jacuzzis, tents, gadgets, etc so both demand for industry and demand for transportation to bring that stuff to them from all over the world. And, they want all the electricity for their large 2200 sq houses (double the size of many other countries).

Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.

I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.

This is wrong. It isn't burning more coal.

I asked Gemini, "How long have wildfires across North America happened and are they truly any worse now?"

"Wildfires have occurred across North America for millions of years, predating humans entirely." It also had some very detailed information backing that up.

I then asked, "Were any of those fires in the past 20 years started by arsonists?"

"Yes, arson is a significant factor in North American wildfires, though it is often overshadowed by accidental human causes (like downed power lines or unattended campfires) and natural causes like lightning."

- Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this

- Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes

- It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots

- Probably something about stock markets and pensions - a world constantly wracked with increasingly severe natural disasters isn't the most economically productive one

If my 50 years on the planet has taught me anything, it's that this is not a sufficient motivation the current generation in power.

Related, home insurance cost increases (and, in places, unavailability) from wildfires & worsening storms hits the pocketbook directly.

A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.

Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...

There are a certain number of people who just cannot change. There are large numbers of diabetics who die despite an enormous number of warnings.