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Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

forbes.com

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Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#61

Post by ixtli »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
_bxg1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about India? As far as I know it doesn't have an authoritarian government. Europe is also democratic and has been a world leader in environmental policy. It's really just the United States that has the problem. I don't think the key difference is authoritarian vs. democratic, but "prudent" vs. "proudly ignorant". America has some deep, deep-rooted cultural problems that are really at the heart of our environ…

You make a very good point, and I upvoted it. That said, ixtli has a very salient point on the subject of how implementing these things is a whole lot easier when you start shutting down factories and arresting scofflaws. But you probably don't necessarily need government as authoritarian as China's to do those things.

Ya I’ve said to another commenter that I just don’t know enough about Indian post-colonial government to be able to comment effectively.

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#62

Post by baddox »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #39
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand. Why would central planning be required to fix climate change? How about just charge greenhouse gas emitters so that there are no longer externalities? I don’t see any reason to turn to central planning, unless one just uses that term to refer to any regulations involving the economy.

It may unfortunately be the only way. We live in a capitalist society where the only reason any sort of enterprise occurs is because there's a profit to be made. The US government just doesn't give a shit to correct negative externalities via smart regulation because it's in bed with all the big actors in most industries.

I don’t quite understand the argument. Since the US government is in bed with big industry, it should take over the entire economy instead of regulate those big industries?

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#63

Post by Loughla »

umadon wrote: post #46
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

require constant vigilance i.e., y’all need to vote.

People keep voting, meanwhile nothing's getting better.

What were the voter turnouts in the last presidential election (which had the most people vote in recent memory)?

What about the most recent mid-term, off-year elections?

People don't vote. Well, old people vote. But that's about it.

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#64

Post by ixtli »

whatshisface wrote: post #56
pm90 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a good question. Notably, most dictatorships are this way and rarely do we find benevolent totalitarian regimes (Park Chung Hee, Lee Kuan Yew etc). The CPC is different in that at its core it still seems to a) believe in science and b) wants to uplift China. The bargain is that CPC will take China down a path of prosperity while suspending democratic freedoms. It’s entirely possible they don’t hold their end of…

> wants to uplift China Why would they want to do that? To stay in power, presumably - the same as any other political organization. If they are ever faced with a situation where the best way to stay in power is to destroy China, they will take it; an option that US politicians might sometimes wish they could take, but are unable to because of limits on their power.

There are a million CPC officials, and 2200 elected representatives. The party claims 89 million members. I’d be critical of attempts to view it as a somehow monolithic entity that exists separately from “the rest” of China.

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#65

Post by ralusek »

ixtli wrote: post #10

I think its very important to engage with the fact that this is something China can do because of what we in the west deem unacceptably "authoritarian" governance. This effect isn't entirely due to people's starry-eyed conservationism: the government arrests people and closes factories that violate these ecological goals. By way of example, this happened a few weeks ago and is very difficult to find coverage of in en…

It is authoritarian, but so is every government intervention. Authoritarian actions aren't inherently bad...it's just dangerous and often suboptimal to resolve issues by force.

This is effectively "infrastructure spending," which is the thing China has done best, and very few people in the US and Europe actually oppose. The complaints against infrastructure spending don't tend to be that they represent government overreach, but rather that they tend to overspend and do a terrible job (see California bullet train).

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#66

Post by _bxg1 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
_bxg1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about India? As far as I know it doesn't have an authoritarian government. Europe is also democratic and has been a world leader in environmental policy. It's really just the United States that has the problem. I don't think the key difference is authoritarian vs. democratic, but "prudent" vs. "proudly ignorant". America has some deep, deep-rooted cultural problems that are really at the heart of our environ…

You make a very good point, and I upvoted it. That said, ixtli has a very salient point on the subject of how implementing these things is a whole lot easier when you start shutting down factories and arresting scofflaws. But you probably don't necessarily need government as authoritarian as China's to do those things.

Right- law and order when it comes to corporations are what's needed, which isn't incompatible with democracy. It is incompatible with the values held by much of America, unfortunately.

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#67

Post by harshalizee »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42
Leary wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Capita (Metric Tons of CO2e Per capita): China: 8.49 India: 2.28 United States: 19.9 Japan: 10.55 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

Is your point that the US is worse? Because, yes, the US absolutely needs to lower its carbon output immediately and drastically. Note that there are lots of other democratic countries doing far better than the US and China.

yeah, and none of those are remotely anywhere the size of the above mentioned countries.

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#68

Post by ixtli »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #27
pm90 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....And it’s currently run by a fossil fuel lobbyist. While I’m not arguing for the US to not be a democracy, it’s important to accept that democracies are not perfect, have many flaws and require constant vigilance to ensure the knobs of State power don’t end up in the hands of incompetent idiots (as they are in the current administration).

require constant vigilance i.e., y’all need to vote.

democracy is not a spectator sport

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#69

Post by aaronbrethorst »

umadon wrote: post #46
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

require constant vigilance i.e., y’all need to vote.

People keep voting, meanwhile nothing's getting better.

Who are you voting for in your municipal and/or state elections in November? Yes, this year. Do you know there are races?

Federal elections are incredibly important, but on a day-to-day basis, city and state elections will affect you just as much, if not more.

Here in Seattle, for instance, seven of our nine city council members are up for reelection, and the outcome will determine how $6 billion gets spent every year. It will help determine whether Seattle can keep pace with its huge influx of tech workers. It will determine whether housing affordability gets addressed.

And not that many people are really aware of these elections. Even fewer are aware of the primary that will determine who's on our November ballot.

So, if you've made a plan to be a voter in your forthcoming municipal elections, then bravo—I'm incredibly happy to hear it. And now get to work making sure that your friends and family members have up-to-date voter registration information on file, and that they have plans to be voters, too.

Vote Save America makes it easy to check if your registration is up to date: https://votesaveamerica.com

Re: Nasa Says Earth Is Greener Today Than 20 Years Ago Thanks to China, India

#70

Post by ixtli »

gamblor956 wrote: post #49
ixtli wrote: post #16

For sure! I'm not saying democracy should be abandoned. I'm saying that 1) china might not actually be quite like its depicted in the west 2) what we call authoritarian is often just counter to our ideology that people should be able to deploy capital however they see fit with little consequence. Anyway your point that it just takes correctly allocated capital to solve this problem is 100% salient. (And before anyone…

China has been disappearing students got the past several months for supporting labor rights...in a communist country..

THIS is a criticism of the CPC. Also, China is not a communist country.
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