It's also brought up for "regular old pollution". Neighbouring countries of Germany are pushing for Germany to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal. South Korean associations are making efforts in China to stop them from building incinerators on their east coast, outside of Beijing.

You probably are just not living in an area of concern.

And of course entire countries are being wiped out due to global (20% US, 11% China, 7% Russia) CO2 emissions

Entire countries? IPCC projections don't indicate any island nations going underwater in the next two centuries.

If Bloomberg is to be believed (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-07/climate-c...), climate change is killing an Ireland's worth of people every year.

What's that have to do with sea level rise?

The only one who mentioned sea level rise was you.

I assumed "wiped out" meant that the country would actually be depopulated. The levels of warming anticipated cannot do that.

Sure, only 80% of say the maldives by the time my kids are my age.

I wonder what Americans would do if other countries worked together to put every single state apart from Alaska and half of Texas underwater in the next generation.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/80-of-maldives-could-b...

2050 is a 10cm rise from today. I expect most of the Maldives is already "uninhabitable" (and always was) by whatever standard is being used there.

You could literally dredge up land 100x faster than sea levels rise for the Maldives.

There are many nasty consequences of global climate change, sea level rise is an irrelevant distraction from things like India heating up and ocean acidification.

> Neighbouring countries of Germany are pushing for Germany to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal.

Unfortunately it is not my impression that this is happening. (Also two neighboring countries - poland and czechia - of Germany have an even higher share of coal and one - the netherlands - is in the same ballpark.)

> Neighbouring countries of Germany are pushing for Germany to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal.

Which is ridiculous on its own, Poland has been ordered for years to shut down the Turow open-pit mine on the border to Germany and Czechia, they refused and were sentenced to 500.000€ per day of continued operation [1], got 15 million € in EU disbursements held back [2]... the size of that thing is insane [3].

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/polen-tagebau-turow...

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/polen-eu-kommission-behaelt-n...

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Tur%C3%B3w#/media/Date...

Your description is slightly inaccurate:

In February 2021, the Czech Republic sued Poland over the mine at the European Court of Justice, the first time that an EU member state had sued another one over an environmental issue.[10]

In May 2021, Poland defied an injunction by the court that ordered the immediate closure of the mine, claiming it would have an adverse impact the country's energy system and lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.[11]

Because Poland had not ceased lignite extraction activities at the Turów mine, on 20 September 2021, the Vice-President of the Court ordered Poland to pay the European Commission a daily penalty payment of half a million euros,[13] but the Polish government refused to comply.[4]

I totally built my coal plants in the corner of the city in SimCity

Yes, the atmosphere is fundamentally a commons. Some pollution impacts mostly at the location of emission and can be regulated by local/national law, but a great deal of pollution (notably CO2) has a global impact.

Same goes for oceans.

There are many international treaties and conventions that recognize this, but they clearly don't go far enough, and we run into the "fear of a world government" issue here.

I'd be entirely unsurprised if countries eventually start considering disproportionate pollution to be an act of war.

"then are we saying all air pollution is an international crime?"

We are maybe not saying that in one voice, but many people, including myself are saying exactly that since quite a while. Same with polluting the groundwater, or the ocean.

One has to differentiate, of course and it is scale that matters. One coal fire is neglectible, but powering the economy with (maybe even unfiltered) coal plants is not. Yet most nations still do it, so it will take a while, before this will be seriously considered a punishable crime.

> One coal fire is neglectible, but...

... a balloon releasing under a pound of SO2 is an international outrage?

My concern is exactly that we don't have a proper sense of scale on this issue.

But the idea is, that this will be scaled up.

But yes, most people are not good at math or basic science, to understand the proportions.

Do you not consider anthropogenic climate change an air pollution issue?

I don't think they do. They have sovereignty over their airspace but not atmosphere and certainly not the cone into infinity.

> The general debate has become extremely irrational, to the point that your intent is all that matters.

Worse: if your intent is to externalize costs onto everyone else, that's fine and dandy, but if your intent is to fix those externalities then you're the asshole, because reasons.

It does seem to be a common thread - not just on HN, but HN does attract entrepreneurs and aspirants thereof, who in turn tend to skew religiously capitalist, so it's unsurprising that it's a bit more pronounced here. The sort of attitude on display transcends climate denialism and jumps straight to what seems to be climate hostility: "I have a God-given right to harm everyone around me to make a quick buck and fuck you for daring to do anything about it".

The reaction to geoengineering is consistent with reaction to ecoactivism: hostile, and demonstrating an absense of self-awareness. Yes, geoengineers and ecoactivists alike can be misguided sometimes; no, that does not mean they're in any way the "bad guys" for daring to at least try to do something about the Cult of Capital destroying the Earth in the name of the Holy Profit.