Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoI mentioned this in another thread which tried to use “emissions per capita”, but that isn’t a great metric because it is biased towards low productivity. We had very low emissions pre-1800s, for example. And North Korea has 4x less emissions per capita than China, are we supposed to follow North Korea’s lead?
Also I hate how everybody constantly frames China as a poor helpless victim of capitalism. This was also mentioned in another thread here. China chose to shift to capitalism at the end of the 1900s. And they can choose to impose stricter regulation on fossil fuel emissions. They choose not to because it hurts their bottom line. Simple as that.
The US and EU have controlled their emissions, while China’s continues to grow. China has the highest GDP in the world, and 7th highest GDP per capita, it has no excuse anymore.
China has all the hallmarks of capitalism - widening wealth gap, massive housing speculation, horrible working conditions, etc. If China gets to use dirty energy as a “short term strategy” with some vague promise to do better in the future, then why not the West? We could call all the evils of the world just “short term strategy”.
starsoaked_lily@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
not some vague promise - china is famously switching to renewables very quickly - check the same website you linked in your previous comment if you need a source for china outpacing the west on renewables - and did the whole thing about china leveraging coal right now to very literally save the world economy from the very predictable crisis caused by the us aggression towards iran just bounce silently off your brain? china focusing on energy resiliency is a trade-off but one you should be presently grateful for (and again, despite that trade-off, china is at or near the top of the list for rate of renewable adoption)
do you really expect china to cap their per capita emissions well below the current per capita emissions of the us? let’s be serious. as you point out, to do so would be to expect china to kneecap itself economically in a way you wouldn’t demand of a western country - are you just mad china has so many more citizens? or are you scared of how far china would be ahead economically if it allowed itself as many emissions per person as the us?
on the subject of china not being a “poor helpless victim of capitalism” i will just point at cuba and so many historical examples of what the global north does to counties that don’t bow sufficiently to capital to be labeled comfortably capitalist enough to slot easily into the neo-liberal international economy. (even if not capitalist enough to not constantly be called communist at the same time)
out of one side of your mouth you say that emissions per capita isn’t a great metric because it is biased towards low productivity - presumably meaning you think it makes china look better unfairly because you are lumping it in with north korea and you see both as under-developed backwaters (also it’s cute how you put “emissions per capita” in quotes as if it’s some made up measure and not literally the first stat on the page for each country on the webpage you use as a source)
but out of the other side of your mouth you point out that china has the highest gdp in the world and is in the top ten for gdp per capita and so it is an advanced, economically powerful country and so should be more strictly controlling its emissions per capita (dramatically more strictly than the us, you seem to believe)
you can’t have it both ways. instead, let’s be consistent and expect the countries with the highest emissions per capita to aggressively reduce those emissions and expect developing countries, like china, to stay below or equal with the emissions of developed countries
(we could argue about if the huge headstart the currently developed countries have means that is already unfair but at this point, personally, i believe the need to work together to reduce emissions makes that a backseat issue.)
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Both can be true. I’m saying that even though China is less advanced than the US (as evidenced by the lower GDP per capita and lower emissions per capita), China still has enough GDP per capita to be amongst the top nations of the world.
At the very least, they should be reducing their emissions like the other top nations. I’m not asking more from China than I am from western nations. I’m asking for them to do the same.
starsoaked_lily@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
except you literally are - it will be a decade or more until china’s per capita emissions match either the us or canada if current trends continue, but considering the current administration in the us doesn’t believe in lowering emissions and china continues to ramp renewables, one could reasonably expect convergence with the us to slow even beyond that.
given that situation, pointing to china as the problem is truly laughable. the world can’t afford for the us to give up on reducing emissions (which it has, at least temporarily seems to have done), and china has a long way to go before it is in danger of not keeping up with the top emitting nations in terms of curbing its emissions.
taken from a forbes article, even on total emissions the current view is very different from the picture you are trying to paint:
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
China is behind the EU in per capita emissions. And anyways as mentioned before, per capita emissions is not the metric I would use. The wiki on carbon emissions also shows per GDP emissions, and on that China is behind.
But there’s another simple metric that China is behind on. Reducing emissions. Not just slowing growth. Reducing them. The US and EU can do it, so should China