Do people in US have twice better life? They don't, its just that the policy doesnt give a flying fuck about environment. The government spends more on military programs to defend from hypothetical weapons that dont exist yet, than it does on dealing with the certainty of climate change.
People here bitching about brazil removing forest, forest cover of UK is like 12%, one of the lowest in thw world. The 'ambition' is to plant like 2% more trees in 30 years. We just cut it down years ago, and so are off the hook.
You know what the wealthy countries should have done? Funded development of fusion properly, actually invested in renewables and shared technology with developing nations, had electric vehicles in mass production by 2010. Then you could do around and point at aome poor farmer fuck knows where trying to feed his family.
As things stand China has 10x more electric buses than the rest of the world combined, a couple Nordic countries have shown leadership in Wind. But most of western world is not just complicit, but a partner in crime, has actively enabled and protected their oil firms to commit literal crimes.
Phytoplankton are responsible for between 50 and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html
Phytoplankton population has declines almost 40% since the 50's. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop...
As the oceans warm and more fresh water is released into the ocean from melting ice it caused the ocean to become more acidic, which is causing the phytoplankton population to decline further. Also as the water warms different types of phytoplankton increase and not all as economics at converting CO2 into oxygen, and some create other problems.
https://theweek.com/articles/747106/climate-change-putting-o...
Phytoplankton are the basis for the marine food chain
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/plankton-revealed/
Over 3 Billion people rely on the oceans as their main source of protein.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/sustainable-seafood
There is nothing we can do as a "stop gap" solution for the oceans, and phytoplankton, just like any natural system in decline the phytoplankton population will continue a slow decrease and then when it hits a tipping point it will crash.
When the phytoplankton population crashes, and it will, the impact will be catastrophic. Short of inventing a technology to capture and sequester 45 Billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each and every year, there is nothing we can do to stop or even slow down what's happening to the oceans.
It's closer to 3x: USA 15.7 vs France 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year (2017, not accounting for other gasses that contribute to warming) [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I.e., if the US had the same per capita nuclear power generation as France, what would the numbers look like?
US emissions are ~29% transportation and ~27% electricty generation [1]. The US uses ~13x as much oil [2].
Natural Gas isn't particularly dirty. Coal and petroleum only make up 24% of power generation in the US [3]. Fossil fuels make up ~9% of electricity production in France [4].
[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/9YFsuN9vjkiiZnek9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consu...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-....
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#:...).
Just a small nit but the OP was referencing CO2. Natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels. “Clean” != low carbon (although it’s lower than other fossil fuels)
The car model of a city is what is destroying our environment. North America needs better urban planning if we have any chance at all in making a dent in global climate change.
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statis...
The biggest driver of loss of woodland, I assume, has been the same as in the Amazon today - farming and logging.
Wikipedia tells me estimates put the 14th century population of England at somewhere between 3.7 and 7 million. The table suggests a downward trend of woodland over time, which I assume would be driven by industry and therefore related to population. Today, urban and industrial land use must be massively higher than it was then, meaning that in relative trends the loss of woodland was even more profound.
How could people in medieval times have required the same footprint of de-wooded land as a population 14 times larger today (even accounting for more efficient farms, move to fossil fuels and nuclear, etc)? What would the natural woodland cover be with no human inhabitants - surely at least 50%?
While I am glad that we have done some progress, there is a large caveat to it. The enthusiasm was great until the grid hit 100% capacity, at which point investment to build more dropped quickly. At the same time the average production rate per day is around 40-50%, which remained is mostly produced through heavily subsidized fossil fuels. It is a leadership of a kind, but it is too early to say if it can produce a solution long term.
And yes, China and India are now large, significant sources of CO2 emissions and both those countries need to do more. There is no solution to global climate change without China and India. If you look at CO2 emissions in the US since 2000 we've dropped -- the trend lines are good, the US is doing its part.
India and China need to do theirs.
And I will just ignore the population bomb that is going off in Africa at the moment.
Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
Poorer countries use coal because it’s cheap and global conditions don’t enrich them enough to get better sources.
The sad truth is we force countries to be poor and exploit their own resources so we don’t have to do it ourselves. And of course then we’ll all pay the price living on a dying planet.
First, they only track emissions that they can directly tie with consumption. The statement "fifty percent of the world’s carbon emissions are produced by the world’s richest 10%" is not supported by the study because it makes no attempt to track all of the world's carbon emissions.
Second, they assume that income == consumption == carbon emissions, which is a very bad assumption. The world's richest people do not spend their entire income every year, so using that as the basis for consumption is inaccurate. Also, assuming that every dollar spent, no matter where or by whom, has the exact same emissions associated with it is incorrect. Wealthy people are the people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and buy new electric cars, but by this study they are penalized for such consumption.
In general, I find that oxfam optimizes their studies for the headlines. When you dig into it, there are so many qualifiers and assumptions made that it seems clear the study was authored with an specific outcome in mind. "The top 10% earn 5x more money than average" is not as outrageous a headline as we are used to seeing. But by multiplying by a carbon emission factor of 1, they get to write "Top 10% emits half of world's carbon", which generates way more clicks.
[1]https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
I made no statement one way or the other, _and neither did OP's study_. I'm just pointing out that the linked paper is bogus.
FWIW, your statement is factually correct - rich countries pollute more per capita than poor countries. I think a more useful metric is emissions per dollar GDP[1]. This measure how carbon efficient an economy is.
We could drop carbon emissions to nearly zero by reverting all of human society to be hunter-gatherers who haven't discovered fire yet. Building a more efficient economy lets us get closer to zero emissions without losing all of our modern quality of life improvements.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...
I only meant to say that the reason poor countries have a low per-capita emissions is because they are very poor. It is not a very instructive or useful metric to look at. Per GDP emissions lets us look at a "lifestyle adjusted" carbon emissions. There are countries in all four quadrants of the poor v rich, efficient v inefficient graph. That gives us a lot more insight into how to structure an economy.
1) the word “tax” In carbon-tax terrifies people, especially in America. So we get a tragedy of the commons situation with the cost of carbon made into an externality.
2) massive FUD and manipulation of media and environmental efforts to stop awareness of climate change for decades.
Fox News destroyed scientists on TV to discredit global warming.
People have made this happen, and they have gleefully lived without any repercussions - which is why the model has been copied around the world.
Hilariously the oil firms are rebranding themselves as eco firms.
Reducing their quality of life and expectations is what terrifies people. People want their vacations to Tahiti, their SUV, their detached single family homes with backyards and front yards, more children etc.
People know the only way out of this is to reduce consumption - of everything. But obviously few want to, especially when they don’t believe others will chip in and reduce also.
Your final point is describing a collective action problem, but that is solved by simply exposing the full cost of a goods to people.
That is what markets do, very very well. Expose costs via pricing, and let people respond to that information.
If your skin care product packaged by X company is 30% more expensive because its cost of carbon is included, then people will buy the less expensive option and go on their merry way.
“People” meaning as a whole, with sufficient cooperation to enact political change, on a global level, such that the cost of pollution can be priced into products.
But that pricing in will also cause the cost of everything we use to go up, causing a decrease in the amount of consumption (which is the intended effect), but that is an immediate and easily visible “loss” to people.
That last part there is very important. I feel much like this, me personally going ascetic, while all my fellow humans don't give a damn, doesn't help anything. This needs to come from the top, the politicians, with rules, regulations, fees and fines. Thus, I vote for the greenest and most ascetic party there is. But I have little hope left.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the other bidder would _also_ prefer to work doing good in the world, but takes the highest paying job instead, so they can outbid me.
It’s like saying “my per hour pay rate went up” and assuming your annual take has also increased. That’s only true if your total hours didn’t drop enough to erode those rate gains.
To your point, GDP and efficiency are both increasing but hours per worker are generally decreasing.
The number two exporter? The United States, at 34.1%, the vast majority of this also goes to China, again, for pigs.
You can easily replace that with > Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the Chinese desire for soy beans to feed pigs
and the point still stands. Brazil is planting soy beans because a rich trading partner is paying them more than the ranforests attract with no future foresight, despite this being a devestating blow to the entire world. It's unreasonable to expect Brazil to stand up and say "hey we're done with this" while other powers are encouraging the practices.
I'm not saying America is blameless, or that it is all China's fault. I'm saying putting all of your effort and focus on America while ignoring the growth of the world's largest polluter will not solve the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464707
The USA can afford to emit less than it did 10 years ago precisely because it has emitted so much in the past and its economy is basically built. Any bemoaning about China or other currently-developing countries that doesn't also talk about how we should also be helping them bootstrap themselves with more advanced systems is just privilege at having gotten there first and pulling the ladder up behind us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Right now, the cheapest approach from scratch could maybe consist of:
1. Over-provisioned renewables,
2. connected to a large-area grid to mitigate local-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity,
3. with enough fossil fuel capacity to basically serve as "storage" and bridge large-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity.
But, of course, China is not building from scratch -- they've been at this for decades. And the inversion of prices between renewables and fossil fuels is a fairly recent one.
You can add US for comparison. China's emissions have been plateauing for the past 10 years, while the US is going down. Per-capita, China is still less than half of the US, so it'll take a long time before the US catches up, if ever.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/co2-emissions-kg-per-ppp-.... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/co2-emissions-kg-....
The exact same argument is true for palm oil in indonesia; blaming indonesia for destroying borneo and sumatra isn't going to fix the problem when it's all being exported to the EU and india.
It is incumbent upon those with the power to stop degrading the environment to do so. Where the Amazon rainforest is concerned, that's Brazil.
Getting every nation which might want cheap soybeans (all of them, to a first approximation) to agree to stop buying from Brazil is a complex coordination problem with rewards for defection. Getting Brazil to stop cutting down the rainforest for the profit of agribusiness is coordinating the policy of a single nation; still difficult, just not completely intractable.
Brazilian soybeans rely on genetic modification to survive in the sweltering climate. Monsanto is perhaps the best target here.
Something I did not know, and definitely a really important consideration here.
In the UK at least, we seem to have palm oil in everything, and Indonesia and that part of the world are busily hacking down forests and killing orangutans in the process.
What's the sudden need for palm oil? We hardly used it in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid.
And because brazilians voted for president a man clearly hostile to science and environment conservation... with not surprising results. If you vote a man that calls himself Captain chainsaw you obtain exactly the prize what you asked for
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred...
Even so called 'ethical palm oil' just means that those that want it, and can't get it from an 'ethical supplier' because Western companies consume the supply, get it from "illegal" suppliers.
People have agency, there's no Coca Cola goons with guns to their heads this time.
The US is one of the largest contributors of CO2 in the world. The per capita argument is silly: They're a single, centralised source of pollution. Just regulate it already. The impact would be phenomenal.
As for the poorer countries: How about the wealthier nations that outright stole the mineral resources from us start paying that money back in the form of a solution rather than having their denizens pointing obese fingers at us?
I'm not saying give the money back (would be nice though), but how about spending that ill-gotten gain on progress for a change?
Also look up a chart of CO2 production per capita and compare Brazil's to your country's before you start talking like you are.
If you want to point fingers then fine, but at least do it properly and be informed.
_Biomass should not count as renewable_
It is not carbon neutral. Monocultures requires petrol based inputs (and petrol reliant for output), and store less than half the c02 of an old growth forest.
Biomass was one of the biggest mistakes in the green movement.
"There was a man in the jungle
Trying to make ends meet
Found himself one day with an axe in his hand
When a voice said "Buddy can you spare that tree
We gotta save this world-starting with your land."
It was a rock 'n' roll millionaire from the USA
Doing three to the gallon in a big white car
And he sang and he sang 'till he polluted the air
And he blew a lot of smoke from a Cuban cigar"
Rich countries still burn plenty of coal. The US ranks 11th globally in per-capita coal consumption, burning 1.6 tons of coal annually, over twice the global average. Australia nearly tops the list, burning 2.8 tons per person. And that's not even touching the truly tremendous amounts of gasoline wasted on individual commuters in first world countries, or the historical emissions used by the "rich" countries to establish their economies.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/604946/per-capita-coal-c... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...
Renewables are nice, but managing and balancing them is a lot more difficult.
There are a lot of caveats to that! Does it get the solar to 95% of the time available at name plate rating? 98%?
• solar PV (fixed) - $1060/kW (utility)
• battery storage power - $1380/kW
• coal (with SO2 and NOx controls)- $3500–3800/kW
$(1060+1380) = $2440 < $3500
I get similar results with KWh costs (i.e. energy rather than power), but the sources are more spread out; it’s still more cost effective than coal even when I make conservative estimates about the number of cycles a LiIon can do.
All these prices are computed "when there are enough supplies", which is easier to guarantee with coal/gas/oil/nuclear. On the best case scenario, renewable are cheaper than anything else. The issue is that the price of electricity is driven by the hardest watts to create, not the easiest ones.
We don't absolutely have to hit zero to do enormous good to the environment. Cut power plant emissions 80% and it won't be the long pole in the tent any more. The biggest efforts will be in concrete and transportation and agriculture.
We already have the power plants built. We've got plenty of time for things to evolve as solar and other renewables ramp up, and fossil fuels go offline. It's not some kind of knock against renewables if they can't solve 100% of the problem. 90%, or even 80%, is just fine.
Picture this: It's 9PM on a cold winter day, sun has been down for hours and there was not been a lot of wind today. People are home, watching TV and heating their home. Batteries are now empty (they started depleting at around 5Pm when the sun went out). You now need to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption of the year, using gas, oil, coal, nuclear or hydro.
This scenario shows that whatever you do with wind and solar, you need to be able to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption with controllable power plants. The cost of wind and solar is not the cost of the power plants vs the cost of the gas power plant it replaces, but on top of it. For every GW of wind you add to the grid, you need to add an equivalent GW from a controllable source just in case. This backup GW won't be used most of the time, but the cost of it should be taken into account when you compute price per GW.
It is unfair to compare the price per GW between solar/wind and gas/nuclear/coal/hydro, when the feature of both are so different. Solar and wind provide amazing ROI, when they want to, not when you need it to. So the cost needs to include the price of the backup system that's going to stay dormant 80% of the time. Ans that significantly change the math of it all.
The only way to get out of this is to either reduce our total energy consumption, so that the current controllable plants can provide enough, and then build solar and wind, to reduce how often we need to rely on them. Or to find a green and controllable energy source, like hydro (which has other issues).
And by “most places” I include the UK, which is north of the entire contiguous USA.
Europeans systematically killed their fauna and their flora to live a better life and would now like to deny others the same. Well, undo your harm first.
Take the beam out of your eye.
Demanding people from poor countries to pay more attention than we did is not fair, not at all.
Meanwhile people who control the global financial markets and industry bear no responsibility
In this case, fairness would probably look like devoting more resources to poor countries so they don't have to go through the same "destroying the environment" cultural growth phase. First world country growth was predicated on the access to energy afforded to us by selling out the environment. We are attempting to cut off that avenue for other cultures. It seems fair to accelerate them past the point of needing to destroy the environment, rather than telling them they just have to deal with being a backwater since they don't have a way to generate the energy needed to become a bleeding edge society.
In more practical terms, and avoiding the concept of fairness, lesser developed countries aren't going to simply acquiesce and stop. They have no reason to. Cutting off their access to large amounts of energy is going to fling them back into the 1700-1800s. Have you seen The 1% on Netflix? It'll look like that. A small number of highly advanced countries with access to plentiful energy and all the technology that brings, and then a large number of countries that are dirt poor. I would be surprised if you could even manufacture modern medicine without access to large amounts of power.
It will create a global power struggle, and first world nations are going to have to police basically the entire world to ensure there aren't any revolts or nations that are refusing to willingly go back in time.
If it's practicality you care about, the USA is perfectly capable of unilaterally forcing Brazil to stop destroying rainforests via threat of sanctions or blockades.
Also, just like how rape isn't fair to Sally, nor is rain forest burning fair to the year 2100 Brazilians.
Make of that what you will. I dont think brazil would burn old forrests at the rate they are with US somewhere in the equation. Nor do I think Indonesia would deforrest without the US/EU need for palm oil above all else.
Yes it does. Very little of todays poverty, particularly in a place like Brazil is of the starvation-level variety and the people burning down the forrests are very much NOT the starving poor, they're on the wealthier side even!
Hmm. Growing up in a developed industrial economy must be lovely. So the communities who've lived in or by said forrests are a non issue? You know, the people who've lived there for centuries if not longer. People to whom the forest isn't just a bunch of trees but home.
Because middle class brazilians in Rio or Cruziero can afford Macdonalds, so there are no poor people and woo woo we can burn down the forest to plant soy and make grazing land for cattle? That's it? Were going to burn millenia old forests just so Macdonalds can make more beef burgers. A fucking burger?
Indonesia is losing their forests to Doritoes. A fucking chip. Future generations better make usuable manure of our bones.
One is confusing between groups and individuals. An individual (e.g. the OP) can have planted several saplings and can thus point fingers (id one holds with these silly heuristics about who is allowed to point out bad things).
The other is that the state of saplings in the USA is irrelevant to whether or not old forests should be burnt down in Brazil.
Nuclear fission power is economically unfeasible and completely incapable of "saving the climate". It's a complete ruse.
Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years from now. And then they will never be profitable and you still have no actual proper solution to waste management other than some fluffy marketing slides.
> And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.
Yea, letting physics run it's course will take 100,000 years too with a plutonium half-life of 24,000 years. A country like Germany doesn't have vast desert lands to store dangerous materials *reliably* for that long. It's also not willing to just dump it in third world countries or international waters.
Just burn the waste and distribute it from smokestacks. That's how coal handles its radioactive waste, and that seems to be accepted.
I agree however, that it's hard to argue for nuclear when it takes so long to get plants built that the developers die of boredom before grounds is broken.
Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.
Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?
Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.
If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c...
Reduce the regs and you could build a new plant in six months for half a billion dollars. Likely while still conforming to a reasonable $60k/QALY.
Nuclear isn't the only thing that tends to take longer than planned. I would confidently bet that we'll still be running coal in 12 years' time. Certainly I think it's worth hedging against when the cost is building what, a few dozen power plants that follow existing designs?
Nuclear was affordable and effective when countries were building out national programs for nuclear. France was building them at crazy speed, every reactor was identical, safety information and skills were shared.
Then came the age of neoliberalism where public infrastructure for some reason needs to be build with private money for profit. We could have lent government money to the project at 0.1% interest, but instead in UK we built it with private money of 5% interest + profit. On a 50 year project that quadruples your cost. Now ever reactor is a different design with different issues, built by a firm that overpromises and under delivers, mired in contract disputes
And not from financing, although the multidecade stretches do not help that either.
EDIT: And these same delays force operation of 50 year old designs to the failure, just because building some new ones is in fact infeasible. Then those ancient reactors fail, as in Fukushima, and we're onwards on the spiral.
Nuclear is a fairly solved engineering problem (it's problem is public relations and economics). If you start building a reactor today in 10-15 years it will begin producing power consistently and will continue to do so for at least it's design lifetime and probably beyond.
Grid scale battery technology isn't here yet. No one has installed a battery (a grid scale battery is multiple Gwh of storage, the Tesla Australia battery is 194Mwh) with that kind of capacity. Excluding of course pumped hydro which is limited by topological factors.
Even if we ever do manage to come together and fund active carbon capture, it will take decades to reverse the trend. And then possibly centuries for the oceans to de-acidify. Together with active efforts to burn down nature in the places where most biodiversity remains, the mass extinction even is likely to run its course before we get to a stable ecosystem. Sure we can restore most of the biomass, but it will be much fewer species. And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.