I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up.

My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).

If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.

Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?

No, because companies that want to employ Americans can't compete with companies that want to employ Chinese, because it costs less to employ Chinese.

In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.

Tariffs have been good for China. In fact their economy is booming. Polluting your own soil is never a good thing and spills over on other aspects of society makes it more expensive.

Prices are low because we have lots of machines using cheap fossil energy working for us. If we have less machines working for us, we'll produce less goods, and we'll be less rich.

More importantly, if you want China, India and Africa to pollute less, the only way to do so is leading by example and figuring out a way to achieve cost-effective, environmental-friendly path for economic growth for yourself. If it works, and it's better, they'll copy it.

Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world. Outsourcing is the primary way the developed world has "cleaned up" so far.

The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.

Nuclear, Solar, Wind and Wave energy are all there if we just were willing to do it (too bad about the Green lobby getting stuck up about Nuclear and the Coal/Oil lobby(+nimbyists) sabotaging everything else).

> Cleaning up the US would probably mean outsourcing more carbon emissions to the rest of the world.

That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.

> There is no other way.

That is not true. The other ways are:

1. Reduction of energy use per person.

2. Control of population growth - at the very least, stabilizing the Earth's population and theoretically a reduction.

3. Using Energy sources which are low-carbon, but expensive and/or difficult to deploy.

of course your way makes it a lot _easier_, but since reduction of greenhouse gasses is necessary regardless of the availability of a convenient energy solution, these are also relevant, and gradually are becoming necessary.

By the way - (1.) is already progressing relatively well in lots and lots of countries.

> That's like saying that cleaning my house means moving the dirt to somebody else's house.

No, it's more like moving your cooking and garage wood shop work to someone else's house, taking the results home, and leaving the mess.

The dirtiest parts of the production chain required to sustain our lifestyle have largely been offshored, not only because of cheaper labor but because less developed or more totalitarian countries will tolerate the pollution.

Yes these things can be done cleaner, but that adds cost that people don't seem to be willing to pay.

Americans want all of: (1) high paying good jobs, (2) clean air and water, and (3) cheap manufactured shit. Sorry, but it's worse than a trichotomy. If you pick 3 you have to pass on 1 and 2.

Isn't this the more pertinent graph?

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...

Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.

If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.

> Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.

But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution.

Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.

Splitting a country is not going to lower the pollution, but equally so does a high populations density not decrease pollution.

Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly more energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.

Hmmm. Could it be our stick houses instead of brick and designs that rely on AC for summer cooling?

Take a look at Canada, it's even higher. That should provides clues.

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.

I’m really not sure this is the case. For example, we know that we have far more than enough capacity to produce food for the entire world, we just simply don’t do it.

Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.

We have enough fossil-fuel-dependent capacity to strip-mine soil to feed the entire world. I'm not sure if we have enough capacity for sustainable food production, and even if, the methods, technologies and supply chains aren't there (and won't be, as long as they have to compete against modern agriculture).

Is it so hard on HN to use specific and appropriate verbs other than “to scale” for any idea related to something expanding or getting bigger ?

But why, if there's a perfectly good, appropriate enough, and concise term available? Being verbose does not scale.

I’m not aware of what specific or appropriate verb I should have used. Happy to edit the post if you can educate me :)

The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly.

Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you.

Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you.

Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.

You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...

It's declining in Africa also.

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...

Thanks for pointing that out. Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

I suspect that Covid is going to run a coach and horses right through that improvement. The best ways of getting population growth down in places like Africa are education and a strong, stable economy - and it's just trashed both.

Actually, the best way is empowering women.

We can also just have fewer people: If you lower infant mortality, educate women and give them access to family planning, all evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children.

It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.

I agree with the premise but the fundamental question is whether we can get from the current status quo to a hypothetical sustainable equilibrium without the squeeze of climate change causing a ton of pain along the way and in a manner that is at least kinda sorta ethically tolerable (i.e. genocide and/or picking who gets to reproduce are not options on the table).

The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.

Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?

Do you have a source for this? Because last time I checked this wasn't the case.

From a quick Google search: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712

More depth can explored using keywords like “global footprint” and “ecological footprint”. What’s your source (“last time I checked”)?

Aggressive population control should be given high priority, yet declining population growth and fertility rates are always depicted as negatives in Western countries. In Europe many countries still have incentives to boost fertility.

It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.

In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.

Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.

Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.

> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy

This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly.

(This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)

>> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy

"We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people?

As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we".

All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent.

Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont.

Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.

"We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".

From the perspective of actually fixing the problem (which takes capital investment), the most pertinent graph would be per unit of GDP.

It acts as both an efficiency measure as well as an indication of whether those most able to solve the issue are doing so.

Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.

If one is to ask "whom's individual citizen way of living is contributing most" we would look at per capita C02. If the question is "Who is at risk of increasing their pollution" you would look at living standards and growth rates. If you ask "Who has the beast means to invest into climate change preventing technology" you would look at GDP. If you ask "where in the production chain pollution is created" then looking at trade gives that. If the question is whom is to be blamed historically for getting us into this situation then the historical global cumulative CO2 graph shows that, through I am a bit skeptical that it actually gives a correct picture since ww1 and ww2 were very central in ushering us into the age of fossil fuels.

> Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.

So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?

Splitting of countries has as much improvement as getting higher population density. A 5 person household does not have less pollution than 4 person household just because they got one person more to share the blame. Similar two countries combined do as much pollution as if they were separated, because physics does not care about borders.

If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there.

If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.

As my logical view, the one who is emitting and can afford to reduce, should work on it.

This is a very harmful, and yet depressingly common answer. "But look at [...finger-pointing here...]" — which "justifies" doing nothing.

So we are doing nothing. And eventually it's going to catch up with us all.

> The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living.

I can't believe that a country wanting to have a "comfortable standard of living" is seen as a "risk". Almost suggesting as if those countries don't deserve them and a comfortable standard of living should be reserved only for a select few countries.

I just can't fucking believe what I just read.

Right? Surely it is the responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis. Putting the blame on developing nations for daring to live the same way we do is... pretty ridiculous.

Don’t apply emotions to science. Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions.

Risk doesn’t mean emotional judgment or anything about who deserves what.

> Ending COVID19 is a risk to global emissions, because the pandemic‘s lockdowns has reduced emissions.

Long term it isn't. Reducing emissions is going to cost a lot of money. There is less money available for that after economies shrink and governments print money to support their people. Covid helps emissions temporarily but harms the overall path.

I assume consumption and population growth have declined due to COVID19, which also greatly reduce emissions. Even after it ends, it will take years before we return to pre-pandemic levels.

But slowing growth isn't enough. It needs to drop dramatically and permanently.

GP is correct, just expressed it in a clinical way. Re-read that commend, but mentally prepend to it "From a perspective of identifying the biggest contributing factors to the climate crisis, ...".

Calling some countries a "risk" isn't a value judgement. It's pointing out that focusing on US, EU and China is looking at less than half of the picture.

It's expressed in the wrong way, but the truth is the so-called developed countries should focus on the ways to help the developing countries in transitioning to renewable energy as quickly as possible. This is as important and urgent as finding a cure for COVID-19.

Especially while the US sits with our thumb in our ass demanding that we do nothing at all. "Comfort for me, not for thee".

Irrespective of who wins, the close nature of the election has shown that significant part of the U.S. lives in a different reality which thinks exactly like that.

It is unlikely there is political capital to make significant changes to reverse the damage.

>The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living.

Do you not think it is a responsibility of the already developed nations to solve this crisis first?

And people still say Malthus was wrong.

At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.

The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

"natural self-regulation"... of human population, in the best case. But before we will extinguish all the biodiversity left. Future generations will see us as the stupid ones, killing the richness of the planet created after eons of evolution.

You're never going to look smart to the people of the future. Look how people crap all over various historical figures because despite some great achievement they did some other thing or had some other views that were not out of line for their time but are not ok anymore.

I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage.

This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.

Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.

If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?

Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.

That's not how "natural self-regulation" works. People aren't PID regulators and don't suddenly adjust their fertility to not exceed the carrying capacity of the environment.

Natural self-regulation means hitting resource limits, followed by sudden and drastic mass dying off, through wars and starvation.

Yes, a decreasing tax base is terrible for societies.

We've already hit peak child and longer lifespans is the only thing keeping the population growing. Assuming this trend continues then human population will start dropping within a lifetime.

(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)

This depends if we've already overshot maximum sustainable population. You can run many different machines at over 100% capacity. The issue is they break down much more quickly. Water would be a good example of a resource that has stores we can use at a speed much faster than 100% of replacement rate.

The problem is that when it comes to emissions and the resulting climate change, it won't be a smooth self-correction but rather sharp and catastrophic. I believe we've already reached the point of no return and the greenhouse effect is out of control (north pole ice not recovering, permafrost melting, etc).

We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.

Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.

> It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west

I believe this is a very dangerous misconception. In our globalized interconnected world nobody will be spared. "We" might suffer a little less then other parts of the world, but effect on "us" will still be huge.

"Natural self-regulation" - that's a nice euphemism for mass starvation. Pity wars tend to cause a spike in population growth.

If the US, brimming with wealth, technologically advanced and educated can't commit to fighting climate change, what will the poorest developing countries decide? They would need to take the burden themselves and falling behind economically (something China in particular would strongly resist). A few defectors can ruin the entire plan because of economic pressure. I think we should be nearing an accord with greater control anyway -- defectors will need to suffer harsh economic sanctions greater than what they'd spend on the accord anyway. I expect this to happen within a few years.