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China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

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Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#361

Post by foxglacier »

andrewflnr wrote: post #337
somenameforme wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key ro…

Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.

Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#362

Post by sometimes_all »

jopsen wrote: post #287
picture wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west. It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the weste…

Everybody makes mistakes. The US is able to mention its past mistakes. China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30 years ago. Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.

> The US is able to mention its past mistakes.

The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least.

Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#363

Post by rtpg »

thesmtsolver wrote: post #209
rtpg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad. If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions? In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could p…

>If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions? China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due to importing timber from rest of the world illegally. > The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of woo…

I'm not talking about China's position, but thinking about texture of the emissions reductions in the rest of the world.

It's probably fairly unknowable what percent of emissions are for products that will be exported back out from China, but I think it's reasonable to say that when I buy some random wooden table from China and import it into Australia (for example), that I am at least somewhat responsible for those emissions, even if per-country emissions data doesn't reflect that!

I don't think this is some free pass for Chinese ecological behavior overall. My general hypothesis has been that at least some part of emissions reductions in the US and Europe are due to outsourcing. I just don't know how much of it is that.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#364

Post by jurip »

AuthAuth wrote: post #165
lbrito wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.

EU isn't a country, it's a union of 27 countries with their separate legislatures. I live in Finland, a country of five million people. According to your math I think I'm allowed to basically burn a lake of oil every day, right?

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#365

Post by rtpg »

mdeeks wrote: post #198
rtpg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad. If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions? In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could p…

That’s a really great point. Maybe their emission curve is what matters. It’s the measure of if they are investing enough into reducing emissions despite their production needs.

The thing is it's not _their_ production needs if they are the factory of the world.

If the US put a 1000% tariff on Chinese goods tomorrow, emissions in China would likely go down a decent amount, right? But is that an indicator of their production needs? Or the US's consumption patterns?

Not that this is some bilateral thing, there's a lot of people buying a lot of stuff from many places. Just thinking about a very simple example, and how I would like to see quantification on this front, but I don't know how doable it really is.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#366

Post by carabiner »

andrewflnr wrote: post #251
yanhangyhy wrote: post #233

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. Xi Jinping may be a…

I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#367

Post by vasco »

ben_w wrote: post #125
vasco wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is about quality of life.

There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the…

There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#368

Post by rtpg »

xethos wrote: post #304
rtpg wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list. My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. Electricity is pretty fung…

> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity. This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity). > it's hard to make the whole thing profitable Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most re…

> This is presumably intentional

It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity

I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?

> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"

Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".

It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.

And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!

I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#369

Post by margalabargala »

ethegwo wrote: post #248
margalabargala wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.

Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since the industrial revolution: - United States: 24% - China: 15% - Russia: 6.7% - Germany: 5.2% - United Kingdom: 4.4% - Japan: 3.8% - India: 3.5% - France: 2.2% - Canada: 1.9% - Ukraine: 1.7% source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?

I added up the 2023 numbers from here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#370

Post by margalabargala »

gchamonlive wrote: post #229
margalabargala wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.

Isn't this 75% less responsibility than total responsibility in case it's only due to regional activities?

Sure, but 25% of responsibility for something like this is well into "consequences of your actions" territory.

If the world had 25% less GHG emissions to date, warming may well still be sub 1C, and the reefs might be fine.

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