Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoIf you want to measure efficiency, population is not the way to do it, economic output is.
The US has 3/4 the GDP of China with less than half the emissions. The EU also has 3/4 the GDP of China, but less than 1/4 the emissions. Both are far more efficient
China builds physical objects for the world. The US sells intellectual property, financial services, with far less manufacturing.
So no, CO2 per GDP is not a useful measure.
When your hospital or HMO decides to jack up the price of a medication, that’s measured as an increase in GDP. When your car insurance goes up, that’s GDP going up.
Information has tons of value. I’m not a fan of copyright but I also don’t agree that physical products are inherently more valuable.
Also regarding insurance raises and other price raises. Prices usually rise when demand rises. So it’s a measure of what people want. Much better than just measuring pure survival. Now if all prices rose, that would be inflation, and GDP accounts for that. But if the price of one product rises while the prices of others fall, that’s just shifting consumer demand. Of course GDP isn’t perfect since there can be monopolies, oligopolies, and state-controlled companies, but imo it’s better than using population as a measure.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is a bad faith argument. You are arguing the efficiency of a country based upon its CO2 per GDP. That’s kind of a shit argument because GDP is a human construct. Global warming doesn’t give a shit about GDP.
How much “value” a country produces based upon…what, exactly? How much it extracts from the ground? How much value other humans assign to those goods?
Capitalism got us into this fucking mess and you’re still using it as the goddamn ruler.
If you want to compare states, fine, I guess that works as a proxy for cultural differences, but if you are going to compare the efficiency of the people within the state, you measure per capita.
Using GDP is just a shit excuse to be able to defend capitalism.
BigDiction@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Energy is money, and US will use more of it per capita because we have more money per capita. That’s going to be true until there’s a massive economic recession or a technology that greatly increases efficiency.
Or you reduce consumption, but the line going down is not part of the plan for China or the US.
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Fossil fuel emissions are also a human construct. We did fine before fossil fuels, and even coal. Population is a horrible measure because all it captures is if you are keeping people alive. Even North Korea can keep people alive. But people want more than just survival.
But fine, you want to talk about population? You’re ignoring the second example I brought up. The EU has 1/3 the population of China and 1/4 the emissions. In other words, China is still the problem.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Huh what?
It’s a human activity, not a human construct.
What it essentially is, is sequestered carbon from millions of years ago, now being burned off and released into the atmosphere. Lion King’s Circle of Life is essentially the Carbon Cycle, and lots of blades of grass don’t get eaten. Carbon that returned to the earth in large quantities and under the right conditions became oil/coal, and now we are digging that back up and burning it for funsies.
But that’s besides the point. The point is that each individual emits an amount of carbon per year, much of which was formerly sequestered. Some countries, each individual is using less than others.
The problem is that you won’t be able to pull out a number that makes America/the west/Capitalism look good, because such a thing doesn’t exist…so instead you just try to brush it off as “oh well our country is better because of this number”.
It’s xenophobia and nationalism. Not science. Not even statistics.
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You’re contradicting yourself here. You’re saying I can’t pull out a number so I…pull out a number?
I’m not even clear what you’re arguing here. My point is that the US and EU emissions have been declining for the past 20 years while China’s continues to climb.
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Is that scientific enough for you?