only 15%? Given that you have less than 5% if the worlds population, you might want to rethink that being a small number.

The best comparison here would be CO2 per capita vs GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita-v...

> We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.

That's like trying to sell someone a $10 carrot by saying it's 50% off, or an over-weight person thinking it's okay that they're eating a bag of chips because they went to the gym.

It's more like an overweight person looking around at the 70% of morbidly obese people in the population, and saying "Meh, few chips won't hurt".

They're wrong...but not nearly as wrong as everyone else.

The world population is 7.8 billion people. The US population is ~330 million people. So the US has ~4% of the world population.

The US pollution being "only" about 15% of the world pollution wouldn't be something I'd pat myself on the back, if I'd be American ;-)

Fair, but the US also produces 15% of the world's GDP [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-sha...

I get this point and am mostly in agreement with the intent. However, the US is also more of a service economy, which would lead me to believe we should tend to have lower emissions/productivity compared to other countries that mostly produce goods instead.

So I am curious if there's a way to associate emissions to different categories of productivity and see if we're more wasteful, on average, when it comes to specific parts of our GDP (e.g. using personal automobiles).

I'm not saying this in the self-hating way that I think is trendy for people in the US, but I am curious in the way that, if we want to improve, we could focus on specific parts of the economy that are more wasteful than others. (Driving would be an obvious one, hence the example.)

In 2018, 69% of the US GDP was Personal Consumption. The contribution from Net Exports was -5%. Yes, minus 5.

All you're really saying here is, "it's alright that our CO2 emissions are so high because we're also such greedy materialistic bastards". That's not a great argument.

GDP is a bad metric. It mostly measures how "good" you are at tracking wealth. Much of value in society is not captured by GDP.

I was raised by parents who loved me a lot and did a pretty good job raising me. Had they been delinquent and raised me poorly, value would have been lost, but the GDP would have been none the wiser.

>There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it’s not the United States.

You can't be serious. There is no plural. There is only one country that emits more than the USA and it has four times as many people, 14% of its emissions are caused by manufacturing products that are consumed in other countries and it has invested more in green technology than any other country on earth.

Not insignificant portions of the rest of the world's co2 is devoted to supporting the US's consumption. Whether through shipments, production of goods, or disposal of waste we offshore a huge amount of our carbon emissions.

> We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.

Is "we" the US? laughs

This sentence becomes more true if you replace "we" with "China". Because China actually contributed significantly to green energy tech by making solar panels dead cheap to produce. Or replace it with "Germany". In that case the number is way off (it's more like 2% of worldwide emissions) but the tech contribution holds up if you look for example at wind power plant tech development and having provided monetary incentives for decades already to deploy solar power at large scale (which in turn allowed China to drive down solar production cost by creating the necessary demand for products).

Where is this significant contribution of the US to green energy tech? Because I mostly see significant contributions to keeping the fossil fuel economy alive (large scale research and deployment of fracking tech, cheap gas prices, inefficient car designs and A/C installations anywhere).

> We don’t need to do anything.

The incredible irresponsibility here really earns the downvotes.

As other commenters pointed out, the US still #1 in cumulative emissions, so the warming we see today and for the next ~10 years is mostly due to the US. Second, the US is absolutely terrible when it comes to per-capita emissions. This is not an example for the world to follow. There is zero moral high ground in telling developing nations to cut emissions and yet gluttonously continuing BAU. If they follow the same carbon intensity curve, the planet is absolutely f*ed. The US and western countries have an obligation to demonstrate how to run a complex developed economy with low, or eventually, no emissions.

This is also incorrect. According to this site:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

The US is responsible for 25% of cumulative emissions.

Still #1, but to be 'mostly' responsible it would have to have emitted more than double the total which it actually has.

It's going to require significant CO2 investment (upfront payment for long term material benefit) if we want to reduce CO2 output materially.

The thesis is for us to get there, we need to increase CO2 output, not reduce it. Let's think about how much CO2 investment would be required to fulfill these projects in the "Green New Deal":

* Coast to coast high-speed rail.

* Retrofitting all major buildings in the USA with better technologies.

* Decommissioning dirty power plants.

* Building nation-wide wind and other green power generating infrastructure.

And we should put our foot on the gas for new green energy research. Inventing better and more efficient technologies has the benefit of reducing global CO2 output.

> if we want to reduce CO2 output materially and continue with our current standard of living.

ftfy.

The truth is that we could reduce emissions by living less affluent lifestyles, like, say, the 1950s. Smaller houses, fewer per capita miles driven, little or no intercontinental or transcontinental flights, less meat. But we won't. We cannot step off the hedonistic treadmill, even for a second, or the economy will collapse. And we can think of nothing worse than the economy collapsing. So we create a false dilemma, an impossible constraint system. So we will fail.

There is no need to fail. Just stop investing in obsolete technology. It's basic economics. Increase the energy efficiency of transport 3 fold by switching to electric cars. Increase the energy efficiency of electricity generation three fold by not wasting it on inefficient turbine based powerplants (coal, nuclear). Fossil fuels are downright disgusting in their inefficiency. There is a reason why we need so much primary energy. It's because when we burn coal 2/3 of the energy turns into useless heat. Heat is so useless you even get it for free by circulating water in black pipes exposed to the sun. The only advantage fossil fuels have is energy density and that they can be used as a chemical feed stock.

The US is using, per capita, way way way more carbon than other nations. If we used the same per capita rate as India it would be a 90% reduction. That would be unbelievable. There would be parades in the streets.

> There would be parades in the streets.

Right now, in India, there is sewage in the streets and profound and extreme poverty. Aspiring to Indian emissions is necessarily aspiring to an Indian quality of life.

Then we will have that quality of life anyway, when we are at +5C and we have global crop failures.

It also produces more per capita as well.

We are #1 in cumulative emissions.

This is incorrect. China is ~double the US.

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

Here is data on total emissions over time.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

edit: being nicer

Ah, OK. This is all time total. I was referring to current annual emissions.

Definitely two different things.

At projected rates when will China "catch up" in terms of all time total?

Just back of the envelope calculation, according to my link the US emitted 400B tons total and China is emitting ~10.8B annually now, so that'd be 37 years with no growth. So yes, the US is in a really deep hole here.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese somehow manage to never exceed 400B tons.

They're already at 200B and the rate is currently at 10B/year and rising rapidly.

So I strongly suspect they will.

Whoops, right. I forgot to subtract what they had already emitted. So it puts it more like ~20 years away.

Did you also forget to add what US keeps emitting?

This shows the US having per-capita emissions of roughly twice the EU and China (2017). I imagine it will be a good while until China catches up by that metric...

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

If it helps, that's not how the English pronoun `we` generally works in writing: it doesn't include "you the reader" by default, it simply implies some group to which the writer belongs. If the writer were trying to imply every reader of HN they might more specifically try to use language more resembling `all of us` or `HN`.