Intermittency beyond a day isn't even a problem because wind and solar basically cancel each others seasonal shortages out. There will be a few days in the year during which output drops by 60% but is that the end of the world for us? It absolutely isn't.

CO2 pollution is mostly about short sighted greed than about maintaining our advanced civilization.

I personally calculated that planting trees would be thousands of times more cost-effective than driving Tesla vehicles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714034

Cutting down a fraction of industrial activity- which represents a fraction of human-made CO2 output, which is only about 5% of mother nature's CO2 output- seems a lot less efficient than improving upon mother nature's own carbon sequestration schemes. It's better to sequester potentially all of the CO2 in the atmosphere instead of targeting a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of atmospheric CO2

The answer has to be to apply technology. Cleaner energy generation and new (or old) methods to sequester CO2.

It's mainly China (it increased theirs in 300% in 30 years) that is the problem.

Legislation and treaties ate mostly worthless, when only the developed world does what they actually agree to, while China keeps making empty promises that they never fulfill.

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P.S. I also don't think that environmental data per capita makes much sense. What we should be looking at is environment metrics per land/sea area: you (a country) has control over a part of the planet, so they have to use that part in a way that they don't over tax those natural resources (for CO2 this is basically directly proportional to the full area of the country).

Most of china's emissions, pollution, environment damage has been to manufacture goods for EU and the US. Europe and the US are responsible for most of the pollution and emissions. It's the price for a high standard of living in a consumer economy. It's why chinese cities and rivers are polluted and why american and european cities and rivers are clean.

But going forward, as china shifts from a manufacturing to a consumer economy, they are going to be responsible for a tremendous amount of emissions themselves. And the manufacturing will shift to poorer/cheaper ASEAN countries or India and eventually africa. What happens after that, I haven't a clue. The global economic system has been to exploit cheaper labor. What happens when the last cheap labor source has been exploited?

If the chinese want to live like an american or a european, then the environment is going to suffer. Then India, ASEAN and africa would want to live like the chinese. Then the environment is going to suffer even more.

It's a hard sell to get the west to lower our standard of living. It's an even harder sell to tell the developing world to accept their lower standard of living.

Most people pretending to care about the environment, aren't really interested in protecting the environment from those that destroy it at all, they are just interested in - by any way - attack the foundations of Western countries so that they can build their dystopian dream from its ashes.

Of course that while they do that, China, and soon India, will pollute so much that will make it extremely difficult to live in here. But, that's really a small price to pay to make the West pay for their sins of the past - real or imaginary.

"This is because such a large share of China’s emissions is from the production of goods consumed in rich countries."

Presumably a discussion is held to arrive at some sort of solution or truth, and not to advertise the moral virtue of the participants.