91–100 of 368 posts
Question: should countries be able to tax imports from countries with more lax environmental laws? Because that would address the argument about cost and staying competitive.
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Isn't this the more pertinent graph? https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...
Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
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The main fear I have during this election is that Biden wins, he picks up where Obama left waging wars, and once again they flood Europe with "refugees".
You realize Obama didn’t start any wars and spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
Obama has been at war longer than any president in the history of the country.
I hope I’m wrong but it seems the world may have to leave the United States in the 1950s where it currently plans to reside. Seriously, it’s time counties who want to improve the situation need move on from worrying about what the United sates is doing because it doesn’t look like much will be happening for a long time.
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And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.
We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.
Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.
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If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.
Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?
In other words there are externalities (polluting the global environment) that aren't priced into the cost of labor when you're comparing the two countries. Tariffs and similar things can help price in that externality.
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Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.
Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly more energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.
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Then you would be entering into a "trade war" with the United States - which most countries aren't going to be able to do.
China may be on the accord, but they still have abysmal pollution right now. So currently, it would be a trade war with China too. This brings up something that I don't understand. How can there be candidates that say they support the environment, support worker rights, and support free trade with places such as China? Laborers are treated like crap and pollution is rampant in China. Promoting free trade seems to opp…
Of course the downside free trade allows production to move to places where there are no controls because non-local pollution both less affects any individual, and because international politics come into play trying to solve it, and those who have a bad standard of living see this as the rich trying to keep them down by not letting them compete.
The last might sound negative about free trade ever solving pollution, but it actually isn't. China and India are both reaching the tipping point where enough people are rich enough to care about pollution that they are doing something about it. Half the world population is already rich enough to care, and that half also wants more stuff so there isn't enough poor places left for this cycle of moving production to repeat for many more cycles. Also, every time production moves they bring the latest technology - China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago. (they are big into coal, but their coal has always been cleaner just because some cleaner coal technology is also cheaper in the long run)
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Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN
I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up. My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. L…
The only way we will substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop a source of energy that is carbon-free (or incredibly low carbon) and cheaper and easier to deploy than coal and gas. Reductions without that are politically impossible. There is no other way. If we don't succeed in doing so, we should plan for significant climate change as a certainty and begin planning our adaptive response.