The reason why the US is ~16 times higher in CO2 output is.... the US produces ~15 times more by GDP (2.45T vs. 0.17 T).

It's not like American's are just sitting there burning coal for the fun of it. It's being used to make stuff.

I really wish we can think beyond nationality when we face a problem that is not going to see border lines.

> There is nothing we can do, as long China and India get a pass, 3.2 billion people in 2 country doing nothing.

This is what the OP said. I honestly don't get it, then why is India's (and China's) responsibility for climate change dragged in whenever the topic of climate change is brought up. Is it because, as you mentioned India has ~16 times less CO2 emissions (per capita, but still way less than US) and ~15 times less GDP?

Isn't there a fair responsibility to spearhead dealing with climate change problem when you are polluting more and have more resources to deal with the problem. While India and China, having their own problems are making efforts in this direction and US is still dealing with denial, conveniently.

How does "making stuff" make it any better? Making (and consuming) stuff is the problem we are talking about. One needs to stop making stuff.

That is definitely not the problem. And that way of thinking is what leads to despair and helplessness, because we will never stop making and consuming.

Apart from a very few things (cement, steel, ammonia), producing things does not directly release any C02. What we need to do is stop burning fossil fuels to produce and consume energy. And that is already happening now. The biggest question is how fast can we make the transition and how much have we already fucked up.

You forgot meat, which stands for 10% or so of CO2 emissions [1] (and that isn't needed at all, compare meat consumption in the west with global average). And I'd consider "travel" a product too, I'm sure it factors into GDP which was the metric under discussion.

You are right, the biggest question is how fast we can make the transition. In considering that question, you can't dismiss lifestyle changes (=current overproduction and overconsumption) as a tool a priori, and say that only options that don't affect lifestyle can be considered.

Consider the lifestyle changes done by a population during a war. A lot of the production and consumption today happens so that people have a workplace to go to, not because it's actually needed, as in a physical necessity.

(I am not sure what you mean by direct vs indirect emission or why it matters; but the primary purpose of reducing production would of course be to reduce energy use, because one is not able to switch over to green fast enough.)

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

No I didn't forget meat. Meat production does not directly put carbon atoms into the air (forget methane for a second). That is what I mean by direct emissions. When we decouple energy from carbon, the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by agriculture changes. The problem with such calculations you refer to is that they assume the current rate of CO2 emissions per unit of energy produced/consumed. When we reduce that number to zero, which we will, those calculations are useless. (Farming is a little more complex due to deforestation and methane, but still the argument stands.) This is whats wrong with people who try to calculate MPG equivalents of electric cars based on the current emissions from power production. Electric cars do not release any CO2, period. Power production currently does, but we will fix that separately.

We need to apply system level thinking to this problem, what is a strategy that will lead to zero (acceptable) emissions? We need to focus 100% on that strategy. I believe lifestyle changes based on moral arguments are a distraction due to the following reasons:

1. Its completely unrealistic to change behaviour at that scale

2. Even if successful the effect is only a minor delay, not an actual solution. Any gains due to consumption reductions is more than offset by growth.

3. Focusing on such things may be counterproductive. First by creating opposition to the entire climate change agenda, telling people to change their way of life makes them oppose it any way they can, including denying the problem completely. Secondly we need to stimulate demand for zero emission technologies, reducing consumption is counterproductive to that.

Given infinite clean energy you can always harvest back CO2 from the atmosphere, so I am not sure why you make the sharp distinction between direct and indirect. Yes, I agree that at the end of they day it's only about the world's energy consumption and energy sources. So I'm just saying "stop wasting energy" then.

The point about lifestyle changes wasn't moral BTW, point is they should not be dismissed if they buy time, in trying to make exponentially growing green energy overtake the exponentially growing problem with CO2 emissions. You are asserting such changes are unrealistic, in which case it is of course no point in arguing for them. (But if you look at WW2 and the oil crisis in the 70s there were large-scale lifestyle changes being made, once the crisis is easily visible and understandable.)

It seems like we need everything that can be thrown at the problem (and probably even then hopes are low). Do you believe any focus on reducing (or rather, stopping further increases of) energy consumption is actually hurting a move to clean energy?

I... uh.

Firstly, the number cited was ~10 times the CO2 output per capita, not ~16.

Secondly, it doesn't follow that GDP production in a primarily high tech, services, IP based economy should track the CO2 behavior of a different sort of economy. It's entirely possible that we're producing far and away more GDP and wasting CO2 production needlessly. (In fact, out GDP multiplier is 1.6 times higher than our CO2 multiplier, hinting that the two are at least partially decoupled.)

I think you might be over estimating how much of the US economy is IP based or high tech.

Google tells me 6.7M people work in tech out of 127M people with a full time job. Roughly 4%? Sure, the GDP per worker is higher, but suffice to say most of the GDP output of the US isn't due to sexy new low CO2 jobs.

Edit: Tech is ~7% of US GDP.

My numbers are based around the idea that the US has a 1.6/20.8/77.6 Agriculture/Industry/Services breakdown, while India has a 17/29.7/45 breakdown, and that 40% of the US GDP doesn't seem to depend in any way on things that would produce much CO2 (compared to say, heavy industry) -- real estate (not construction), finance, health care, information, entertainment, corporate governance and education. (That's not counting another 15% unspecified government spending, which likely includes a substantial amount of non-CO2-producing expenses, likely pushing that number up to about 50% GDP.)

Similarly, industry-volume-for-industry-volume, the US should be more efficient in production, meaning that it should use lower CO2 even with the same level of industry.

Which is what we see: the US does use less CO2 to produce more GDP, precisely contrary to what the argument supposes (that they're exactly correlated).

I'm not saying that the US does make poor use of its CO2 emissions, merely that the argument I was responding to failed to show either direction -- the argument it made was fundamentally unrelated.

Ed: To put math on it -- the US is somewhere between about as efficient as India and less efficient than India, depending on how exactly that 40% aligns with actual CO2 production and how closely that 15% aligns with CO2 production. In the case of the 40%, the US is within rounding of not wasteful. In the case of 50%, the US is somewhat less efficient and probably is wasting CO2 production.

The problem with your analysis is that a) it was simply wrong about the numbers, and had a 1:1 CO2:GDP relationship, when the numbers don't bear that out (and hence didn't account for my objection) and b) it supposes a fact about comparing CO2 production to GDP that isn't true, because the composition of economies varies substantially.

I wasn't saying you were wrong. I was saying your argument was bullshit.

Like weapons for export to Saudi Arabia to level Yemeni towns to reduce CO2 emissions, for example.