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.
The number two exporter? The United States, at 34.1%, the vast majority of this also goes to China, again, for pigs.