
Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions - jsingleton
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html
======
mattigames
Is so obvious where this is all going: The wealthy -the factories owners and
their close allies- the very same ones ignoring the pledges to stop
contributing to climate change will be the only ones protected enough from
most damages of climate change, only the wealthy will afford to live in the
cities with livable temperature, to buy potable water, only the most resilient
of the poor and middle-class will survive, and their youngsters will be used
as soldiers to fight for natural resources, some of their families will enjoy
those resources but only enough to breed more soldiers to keep the wars going.

~~~
dcolkitt
Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true
that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's
simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable
hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence.

The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by
somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it
represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per
capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets.

Let's be very conservative and assume global GDP per capita grows at 2% per
year. In the baseline scenario, the median world citizen would still be 390%
richer than the average person today. Applying the worst global warming impact
(20% of GDP), the median person would still be 290% richer than the average
person today.

Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially
poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous
economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case
that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-
globa...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-global-
economic-growth-new-study-finds.html) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change)

~~~
BurningFrog
Someone at Reason actually read the UN/IPCC report. There is no doomsday in
it. From [https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-
of-a...](https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a-degree-
of/)

> So how much economic damage will pursuing the IPCC's fast transition to a
> no-carbon energy system spare us? The report asserts that if no policies
> aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, then
> average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting
> in global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been.
> Comparatively speaking, in the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would
> only be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent respectively.

> Concretely, the global GDP of $80 trillion, growing at 3 percent annually,
> would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it
> would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a loss
> of $2.7 trillion resulting in a global GDP of $900 trillion. Note that the
> IPCC is recommending that the world spend between now and 2035 more than $45
> trillion in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people
> living three generations hence. Assuming the worst case loss of 2.6 percent
> of GDP in world with a population of 10 billion that would mean that they
> would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year (the
> average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)

~~~
ForHackernews
Plenty of people who would have reason to know think the IPCC's reports are
overly conservative because they are trying to spur action / avoid defeatism,
and because they have to reflect a baseline consensus of many researchers.

[https://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-scientific-
consensus.htm](https://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-scientific-consensus.htm)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/30/clima...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/30/climate-
scientists-arent-too-alarmist-theyre-too-conservative/)

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43e8yp/the-uns-
devastatin...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43e8yp/the-uns-devastating-
climate-change-report-was-too-optimistic)

------
carapace
You don't have to wait for anybody.

Maybe the most important thing to know is that we can make carbon-neutral
alcohol fuel, and, integrated into regenerative agriculture ("Permaculture"
et. al.) the economics are totally different than large-scale industrial
ethanol production.

Think Community-Supported-Agriculture that supplies your gas.

Dave "Farmer Dave" Bloom collected all the necessary info into a book (that
was banned from public tv at the time!)
[http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/](http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/) Get the book,
find or start your local fuel co-op!

\- - - -

For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re:
Permaculture

[http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/](http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/)

Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not
Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".

Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau
of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide.
It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either.

\- - - -

See also [https://www.greenwave.org/our-work](https://www.greenwave.org/our-
work) Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs?

\- - - -

For more inspiration and projects search "Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert"

------
perfunctory
Climate crisis is getting scarier and scarier by the day. Don't know about you
guys but I am done with sitting behind my computer and whining about what
"they" should or shouldn't do. I am joining Extinction Rebellion.

~~~
jsingleton
Do it.

[https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-
developers-...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-
climage-change/)

> In the end power is social. Power comes from people showing up to meetings,
> people showing up for rallies, people going door-to-door convincing other
> people to vote for the right person or support the right initiative, people
> blocking roads and making a fuss.

> And that takes time and money.

If you work in tech you probably have a surplus of both.

------
jwr
How is this not the #1 story? Why do we even bother with all the other trivia?

~~~
jsingleton
I think you have perfectly summed up the thoughts of all the school strikers.

------
coldtea
> _A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made
> toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions._

When countries have made real progress "toward limiting greenhouse-gas
emission" one would not need charts to see it: it would be immediately evident
in everyday lifestyles, consumer habits, and energy use...

~~~
dcolkitt
Not necessarily. For example just switching over coal-fired plants to gas-
fired plants reduces carbon emissions by 50%. (This is a big reason why the
US's emissions have decelerated since 2000.) Yet that would be almost entirely
invisible at the consumer level.

~~~
phtrivier
Moreover, I would actually argue that the _only_ way we're going to affect
climate change is if we find at least one big slice of emissions that can be
reduced _without_ having to change habits or going against engrained values
too much.

In order of what will probably work best:

* Something barely noticeable (eg: any improvement in electricity production that does not make the customer's price skyrocket.)

* Something noticeable but not fundamentally annoying (Pay people to get electric vehicles, Norway-style. Make a large part of your transportation public and electric.)

* Something noticeable, but _fun_ . I don't have a big idea on this one, and it kinda sucks.

* Something noticeable, and that "gets you laid" (tm). Something along the lines of "I have a Tesla. You should have sex with me.", but scalable. If someone finds this, we're saved.

The last one would be even more powerful as it could reshape at least some
people's identity into "I'm the kind of person who care about climate change",
so all the other changes that actually require discomfort could get
rationalized away (apparently, we're pretty good at this as a species.)

So maybe someone needs to organize Vegan Supermodel Orgies _as well_ as
marching in NY. Just saying.

------
Mikeb85
So who wants to volunteer to have their living conditions drastically reduced?

The west likes to blame China and India, places we've outsourced manufacturing
and work to and yet somehow they still produce far less CO2 per capita. We
shame people into reducing their individual emissions while ignoring the fact
that industry produces most of the emissions.

The fact is, no country is going to take drastic measures. We don't know
exactly what's going to happen when the world warms 3 degrees (we have ideas,
but the world has been both warmer and colder in the past, and somehow life
survived). We do however know what would happen if we suddenly stunted
economic progress tomorrow (nothing good).

~~~
r00fus
Sounds like you're always the first one to reply to anything climate related
with some false dichotomy.

We can make changes without adjusting living conditions drastically - moving
to EVs, removing fossil fuel subsidies, pushing solar over coal/gas.

In fact, we might improve our living conditions by reducing our addition to
oil, as long as it's managed and not cold-turkey.

~~~
Mikeb85
> Sounds like you're always the first one to reply to anything climate related
> with some false dichotomy.

Nah, somehow I just got unlucky enough to log on when alarmist articles are
somehow in the feed. I'm simply not huge on alarmism.

> moving to EVs

Which run on electricity generated by coal.

> In fact, we might improve our living conditions by reducing our addition to
> oil, as long as it's managed and not cold-turkey.

And we will. Just not huge on articles where every comment essentially says
the world is going to end 10 years from now. It won't.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think the assertion isn't that the world is going to end 10 years from now.
It's more that unless we pull off a miracle in the next 10 years, it's
essentially going to end this century.

~~~
Mikeb85
Still not going to happen.

~~~
esarbe
Yes it is.

And I can continue that all day long.

When you are standing on the rails with a high-speed train rushing towards you
and your buddy next to you is yelling "LET'S GET OF THE RAILS OR WE'RE GOING
TO DIE!", that's not alarmist. But you try to make it look like that.

Seriously. Looking at your history of comments, climate change denials seems
to be one of your things, so trying to reach you is probably a lost cause.

Yes, the world is burning. Yes, the ecosystem is failing. Yes, hordes of
hungry refugees will roam the planet (probably even Alberta!). Yes,
civilization is going to collapse.

(If we don't get our shit together REALLY quickly, which I doubt we will).

Sticking your fingers in your ears, sticking your head into the sand, singing
"LALALA" very loudly and calling people 'alarmist' is not going to change
that.

But hey! Après moi, le déluge!

At least we will have had the most awesome orgy of consumption and self-
deception, like, ever.

Awesome!

~~~
Mikeb85
That's a pretty pessimistic view, with no basis in reality.

Fact is, the world has more people than ever, yet is richer than ever, there's
less poverty and hunger than ever, the world is more peaceful than ever, and
there's certainly no signs of collapse and certainly not in 1 decade smh...

If you truly believe that we're a decade away from collapse, why aren't you
stockpiling food and weapons in a bunker? Because there's no sign of political
will from the major CO2 emitters to curb emissions so your worst case scenario
is definitely happening, right? People say these things, yet I don't see any
of the climate alarmists actually doing things to indicate that they're
alarmed...

~~~
esarbe
I don't know where you got the 10 years from.

Yes, we've got more people than ever. There is less poverty and hunger than
ever. The world is more peaceful than ever. That's because we've been on a
glut of predatory ecosystem exploitation for the last 150 years.

The signs that we are running headlong into a global ecosystem collapse are
everywhere. So my view is pretty much based in reality, so here are my facts.

If you care to check them.

We've wiped out 60% percents of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since the
1970
([https://s3.amazonaws.com/wwfassets/downloads/lpr2018_summary...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/wwfassets/downloads/lpr2018_summary_report_spreads.pdf)).

We've killed about 30% of the insect population:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations)

Phytoplankton has been reduced by 50% since the 1950s
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268)
. You know, that's the stuff that produces our oxygen
([https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to-
worlds-...](https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to-worlds-
oxygen)). An increase in temperature of about 5°C and more will probably kill
off most phytoplankton.

These are just some documented and recorded facts. Now we get to the fun part,
where we think about their impact.

Let's take for a given that the antrophogenic climate change won't stop at the
blue-sky +2°C that everyone is hoping so hard for (hoping, not acting).
According to IPCC 2018, we're CURRENTLY between +0.75 and +1.25°C, with the
very real possibility of reaching +2°C by the 2040.

We thought that we had about 30 years to mitigate some of the worst damage.
But now - holy shit! - the arctic permafrost is melting, about 70 years
earlier than expected. And it's starting to release methane, a way more potent
greenhouse gas than CO2. Sure, it rapidly decays in the atmosphere, but not
before kicking us to about +4°C. This is the temperature range where some
Scientists fear that frozen methane from the ocean floor will start to be
released.

(Do you remember that at about +5°Celsius the phytoplankton will start dying
off? )

So, we have a massive temperature increase at an unprecedented speed that
makes huge areas of earths most populous regions inhospitable or even
inhabitable. Do you think the Syrian refugee crisis was bad? Think about ~1
BILLION PEOPLE on the search for greener (literally) pastures. Do you think
they will be welcome with open arms? Yeah, you bet..

Agriculture will be severely impacted. Not only by the heat, but also by the
massive die-off that ensues. Most of the animals on earth have a lifecycle
that's very closely tuned to the hum of the seasons. At +4°C you can kiss all
that goodbye. The only things that will survive are generalist species that
have a lifecycle not tied to the seasons. (Cockroaches maybe. Certainly not
butterflies. Enjoy them while they last!)

There will also be terrible conflicts and wars about the most precious
resource of them all. No, not oil. We'll have oil in barrels, nobody will be
lacking oil (at least at first). No, I mean water. We'll have water wars.

This will also be the time that the global economy will start to collapse. War
is good for only one business, and that's weapons. Everything else will
suffer. Don't expect any deliveries from your Chinese online shop of choice.
Consumer markets will crash, everything will come to a standstill.

No, I don't stockpile. Because this is going to happen over the course the
next 30 years and I'll be long dead when the really bad shit is starting to
happen. I've trained my kids to be able to work with wood and scrap metals to
improvise all kinds of tools and machines. All of them are also receiving
training as horticulturalists, for what's that worth.

That's the least I can do for them.

------
eloff
I've thought a lot about climate change and it's consequences. If we trigger
runaway warming through feedback loops involved permafrost and ocean
(hydrates) methane - things are going to get really, really bad. This happened
when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions
caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another
~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian
Extinction, also known as "the Great Dying" where 96% of marine species went
extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. Clearly if that happens, we're really
in trouble. I don't know how likely that is, or what the trigger point would
be. The climate today is not the same as it was 250M years ago.

On the other side of the coin, the Earth is uncomfortably cool these last few
million years. We have these repeated periods of glaciation. Having Europe,
Russia, Canada, and the northern US ground to dust beneath kilometers of ice
would be a bit of tragedy too on a similar scale. That it's further away in
the future doesn't make it less of a problem - if we're too aggressive solving
climate change we could imagine a future where we have to deliberately pump
methane into the atmosphere to stave off an ice age. For better or worse we
seem to be at no risk of this through our ineptitude in responding to climate
change.

For people worried about coral reefs dying, it happened less than 10K year ago
at the end of the last ice age. Sea level rose 400ft and drowned the world's
coral reefs. They bounced back, as you can see today. They will also bounce
back from climate change - it will just suck in the meanwhile. There are
undoubtedly things we can and will do to make it suck less, like developing
heat resistant corals, planting reefs further north/south, etc.

For people worried about coastal cities being submerged, relax, you'll be dead
by then. Long term, we should be moving our investment to more sustainable
areas. But infrastructure doesn't last forever anyway, so I think a lot of
that may occur naturally as people just stop developing new infrastructure in
low-lying areas. There's no question it will cost us though.

If you're really worried about climate change for your descendants, get
Canadian citizenship. That's one of the few countries likely to benefit from
climate change.

So to sum up, climate change is not all bad, just mostly bad, until or unless
it runs away on us, and then the doomsayers may be right for a change.

~~~
perfunctory
> relax, you'll be dead by then

This is part of the reason so little is being done to combat climate change
now. If we don't act now though, the future generations will definitely drown.
It will be too late for them to do anything.

> That's one of the few countries likely to benefit from climate change.

This is one of the most dangerous delusions. In our globalised interconnected
world nobody will benefit. Just think about the last financial crisis.
Mortgage crisis in the US caused chaos in the whole world.

~~~
eloff
Nobody is going to drown. People will do some combination of building walls,
raising land, and moving. It will play out over a period of a thousands years
or more. There will be a non-zero cost associated with diverting resources for
these things, but that's not the end of the world. I'm not saying it's an
excuse for not acting though. We have a responsibility to take care of our own
mess, rather than just dump it on our children.

I still think the comparative lack of low-lying coastal land, plus ample
freshwater, increased growing season, and increased arable land will be net
benefit for Canada and Russia. Plus if things are as bad as you say, they'll
benefit from increased demand for immigration as well (even if you don't take
on more people, you can select more desirable immigrants.)

This is not a crash situation like 2008, this is more like a glacier that's
flowing towards you. You have plenty of time to plan your response, like
moving out of the way, but you can't stop it. Trouble in other countries will
have unpredictable, but not necessarily all bad effects.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Is it now? The predictions are, as far as I understand, that a lot of coastal
areas will become submerged this century, meanwhile the rising temperatures
will (and already are) mess up with the food supply. As that accelerates, the
world will see a migration wave like never before in history, and frankly, it
sounds like straight to World War 3 from here to me.

The planet, frankly, doesn't matter. It'll be fine. The thing that matters is
our technological civilization. Whether it's a gun or a glacier, our
civilization is fragile, and when it fails, it's essentially game over for
humanity - mass deaths followed by the remaining survivors stuck in medieval
conditions for many thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

~~~
eloff
Things won't move that quickly, and hopefully they won't get that dire. We
can't rule it out either though. There's plenty of good reasons to worry and
take action. It is still a tragedy unfolding. But it's not necessarily as doom
and gloom as many people believe.

~~~
jajag
But things do move that quickly. Current projections [1] have global sea
levels rising from anything between 0.3m and 2.4m by the end of the century.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise)

~~~
eloff
That's pretty slow for a change smoothed out over eighty years.

~~~
jajag
Well, (a) it's a hell of a lot faster than it has been for most of my life,
and (b) it means that in my lifetime, a lot of the places I know & love will
be seriously affected by - if not completely lost to - sea level rise.

I get the sense you don't live anywhere near the coast.

------
nostromo
Actually a lot of progress has been made, except in China, which has increased
emissions to the point of reversing all other progress globally.

By comparison, US carbon has been going down since 2007, despite a growing
population and economy. Per capita it's been declining for over four decades.

China now emits more than the US and EU combined, despite having much, much
less economic output.

~~~
uoaei
Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the
destination country, not the production country.

China supplies the world a lot of goods. It doesn't seem appropriate to put
the onus on China when the end result of that production run brings all that
stuff over to another country.

~~~
jplayer01
> Carbon emitted as a result of manufacturing should count toward the
> destination country, not the production country.

Has anybody studied this yet? This point comes up every time this issue is
discussed, but I don't remember ever seeing any effort into quantifying what
the situation looks like from this perspective.

------
eledumb
Reducing output isn't going to happen, well it won't happen until it's too
late. It's like the smoker that gets diagnosed with cancer, and then decides
to quite smoking.

It's also ludicrous that think that warming will stop and hold at 1.5 or 2.0c
adding less won't stop the increase in climate warming, it will just cause the
increase to be slower.

The other thing that's ludicrous is that we aren't monitoring the earth's
output, the warming oceans, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost are now
contributing greenhouse gases due to the warming climate, they are now locked
into positive feedback loops. Which means every cycle the changes get a little
bit bigger as the cycles feed themselves. Unless we can start to reduce the
total amount of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere these feedback loops
are just going to keep running.

------
sarbaz
So, is there any convincing reason to think that any emissions targets will be
met? Does anyone buy the line in the article about India? Surely they will
become an emitter at least as significant as China.

Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate
change?

~~~
familysized
What's wrong with the line about India? It's absolutely correct - per capita
emissions from India are very small.

> Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China.

Looking at a country's total emissions makes no sense because the population
needs to be taken into account. India will eventually have the largest total
emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low.

~~~
coldtea
> _India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine
> because per capita is really low._

Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the
total sum of emissions...

So "India eventually [having] the largest total emissions" means a huge extra
tonnage of emissions will be added to the already troubling amounts...

So, the per capita number is mainly relevant in regards to fairness...

~~~
reitzensteinm
What the Earth doesn't care about is the arbitrary lines in the sand we
declare to be this nation or that.

~~~
wtdata
What Earth does care about, is when you decide that's a good idea to have on
average more than 4 children per couple over the last 2 generations in India
[1] instead of only 2 or even less children per couple like in USA or the EU
[2].

[1] [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-
ra...](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate)

[2] [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
states/fert...](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
states/fertility-rate)

Every country has a set of natural resources at its disposal. It should manage
and cherish those resources and not overtax them. If a country decides it's a
good idea to perpetually grow their population when all they have are the same
set of natural resources available, then well, the onus is on them to figure
out how to do it without destroying everything.

~~~
reitzensteinm
You're making my point. The US went through the same process, with the same
birth rate interrupted only by the great depression until two generations ago.

There aren't countries, there are humans responding to the same conditions
similarly. Economic development will slow their reproductive rate, like
clockwork.

If you point to a family in the 60s in the US and a family in India today and
find only one of them irresponsible, your thinking is flawed.

I assume you're following through with your convictions and will remain child
free?

~~~
wtdata
> I assume you're following through with your convictions and will remain
> child free?

No, I will remain with my child at replacement rate (a little below actually),
like my parents and my grandparents did (and all parents and grandparents on
average here), and I expect them to be entitled to a lot more resources than
someone who lives in a country where (on average) their parents, grandparents
and themselves didn't follow the same principle.

As a fact, India's CO2 emissions per unit area are almost the same as EU. We
are using the same share of ecological resources (assuming roughly they are
equivalent on average per area), so there is nothing to give or to take from
both sides.

P.S.: A family in USA in the 60's, 1st: didn't had any idea that there was
such thing as a catastrophic global warming incoming, 2nd: had a 4x smaller
population density than India has today. But sure, go ahead and keep
pretending that Earth's resources magically increase anytime someone decides
to have a new child, so that you can tell yourself we are all entitles to the
same amount of resources, no matter the size of our immediate family.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I had a hunch.

~~~
wtdata
I also had a hunch that you interest isn't really about saving the planet but
in supporting the implementation of your ideological agenda.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I have no ideological agenda other than not engaging in casual racism to
construct a boogeyman to point at to absolve myself of the substantial impact
I've made to the climate.

~~~
wtdata
What do you mean?

It's not your racism that has you stating that someone in a country with a
very good track record when it comes to CO2 emissions (and a number of other
environmental aspects) should stop having children, so that someone in a
overly populated country, with an appalling record when it comes to all kinds
of pollution can have even more children?

If it's not racism from your part that makes you ask for that, than you should
clarify what it is. But one thing is for certain, it's not environmentalism
for sure.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I'm not telling you not to have children, but it does make you a hypocrite.

I'm accusing you of casual racism for drawing a false distinction around the
behavior of Indians. They are doing what everyone else has done in the same
circumstance. Just because we have gotten our growth spurt and dirty economic
development out the way doesn't entitle us to waggle our finger at those that
took longer.

It's on the first world to fix things first. The wealthiest should have the
lowest per capita emissions, not the highest. Shouting at the third world for
their high population count isn't environmentalism, it won't work, and it
doesn't give you the moral high ground.

~~~
wtdata
> They are doing what everyone else has done in the same circumstance.

We already established those aren't the same circumstances at all:

\- 1st: we didn't have even 1/4 of the Indian population density when we were
having the same birthrates.

\- 2nd: When global warming became clear and urgent action was needed, we
started reducing our emissions while India during that time already increased
them by 400%, and is going to increase them by another 100% in the next
decade.

It's not by keep repeating the same lie that you are going to make it a
reality.

~~~
reitzensteinm
We didn't establish anything. You grasped at the density straw in order to
intellectually justify your prejudice.

The poor in India should increase their emissions, because otherwise they'll
die. Life expectancy has risen from 40 to 68 years since the 60s. Would you
halve your life expectancy to fix global warming? I don't think so.

In any case, the births have already happened, and India is now barely above
replacement rates, which you've conveniently overlooked. You want them to die
because of the choices their parents made.

If you excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower. I honestly can't believe I'm
having this conversation on HN.

~~~
wtdata
> The poor in India should increase their emissions, because otherwise they'll
> die. Life expectancy has risen from 40 to 68 years since the 60s.

So, you are saying that CO2 emissions are actually good for the population and
the way forward is to actually increase them even more. Interesting turn of
events from an environmentalist.

> You want them to die because of the choices their parents made.

Funny thing to say, since you want the West to pay for the choices our
grandfathers made and descend into deprivation, so that the rest of the world
can go on polluting even more.

Here is the thing, people with your discourse aren't interested in saving the
planet but into forcing your ideological agenda - which is got nothing to do
with environmentalism but with your personal concepts of morality - upon the
rest of us under the threat of environmental catastrophe. And the worst part
of it? It does nothing to tackle climate change.

P.S.: > If you excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower. I honestly can't
believe I'm having this conversation on HN.

Go easy on that shower, it's a big toll on the environment and, after all, you
just spent the last 24h telling us all how those resources actually should
belong to be used by people in India and not selfishly by me or by you.

~~~
reitzensteinm
My ideological agenda is valuing the life of an Indian equally to my own.

~~~
familysized
Don't feed that troll, just downvote and move along.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Seems we both fell in to that trap.

------
joshuaheard
It looks like if you take China and India out of the equation, the numbers are
trending down.

~~~
riffraff
If you take China and India out of the equation you are removing a lot of
goods which are used in the rest of the world, though.

~~~
jajag
This is a whole part of the problem. Globalisation and the offshoring of
manufacturing to the east has meant a corresponding offset of emissions from
the Europe and the US to China and other places. We in the West have to take
some responsibility for this. You can argue that globalisation does have a
noble goal - i.e. to reduce global inequality by raising the standard of
living of all to that of the most well-off nations - but the now obvious
trends of climate change, global heating and emissions, are showing this to be
a dangerous and unobtainable goal. It seems to me that we have to start
looking at reductions of living standards in the West (to maybe what we had
30-40 years ago) with corresponding reductions in global trade. I have little
confidence that we can actually achieve this in an organized and equitable
manner.

------
jsingleton
The UN Climate Action Summit 2019 is live online
[http://webtv.un.org/](http://webtv.un.org/) or
[https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/](https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/)

------
neves
USA and Canada have more than the double of emissions per capita than China.
While these countries doesn't take the responsibility for climate change,
nothing will change.

~~~
dade_
There should also be a factor for land mass when considering "fairness", but
reality is that the tar sands are the cause of our growing ghg emmissions.
Even the industry's propaganda site claims it is single handedly responsible
for 10% of Canada's emmisions: [https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-
topics/ghg-emissio...](https://www.canadasoilsands.ca/en/explore-topics/ghg-
emissions)

I can only imagine how much money they spend trying to rebrand tarsands as
oilsands...

------
jsingleton
The data comes from
[https://climateactiontracker.org/](https://climateactiontracker.org/),
specifically [https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-
gaps/](https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/) (where you
can download a spreadsheet).

------
dwaltrip
This shouldn't be flagged. Is there any way to vouch that a story shouldn't be
flagged?

------
carapace
Flagging climate stories? WTF?

~~~
jsingleton
Perhaps a vested interest controls lots of accounts on here and wants to bury
stories of this nature (pun not intended)? The comments don't appear to have
descended into a flame war so I suspect a bot net has manually flagged it to
death.

I've seen it a lot on here and it makes me think it's not worth engaging with
HN any more.

~~~
carapace
Nah, see? The mods got up Monday morning and put the kibosh on the hijiinks.

------
kossTKR
The fact that articles from Nature are getting flagged now is beyond dark.
Vested interests, desperate denial or plain delusion?

~~~
QuitterStrip
It seems discussion on climate change is being discouraged on hn. An article
from the BBC was also flagged. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042054)

