I’ve been in plenty of stupid big SUV’s with air conditioning blasting in the summer while in China. Big SUV’s are a status symbol and China summers are horrendously hot.
That being said I’m much more concerned with trash burning (it still happens, I’ve seen it plenty when driving outside of cities) and the byproducts of the intense construction that can’t be slowed down without seriously hurting their economy. I know multiple Chinese people with their retirement investments in concrete manufacturing companies that are losing big with recent government clamping down on that.
Both of these are anecdotal, sure, but then again I don’t trust official Chinese government data so anecdotal has some value.
The USA and other developed countries went through their own periods of abusing the environment during their industrial revolutions so I have to assume China will get through this as well. Things are already improving. And at least their government acknowledges it’s something they need to improve rather than actively regressing like the USA.
The US emits more CO2 while Europe releases far more NOx and other more “traditional” pollutants.
The diesel emissions scandal in the US had a European counterpart that was never dealt with. 2018 models are still polluting far above the official limits which themselves are more lax than the US. [1]
Per capita CO2 emissions are much worse in the US than China. China also has CO2 reduction policies and a massive drive to adopt modern generating technology.
The US is often singled out because of a dogmatic refusal to accept reality, and policies that actively increase emissions.
Read the central table, the data is from 2015. Every metrics shows the US is worse: total, per capita, per GDP. (The last two shows the US is more than twice as much polluting. I doubt thé US cut it's emmision by more than half since 2015. Other country are also not standing still. Germany vowed to cut off coal entirely in the next decades.)
Yeah but look at our totals. It’s very low. Per capita it is bad. We are wasteful and an oil producing country but our population is spread out and we have a colder climate. Check out the breakdown and you’ll see transportation is the offender.
Not true. The US is responsible for 14% of emissions, which is unconscionable for a country that only holds ~4.5% of the world's population. You're actually doing quite horribly on a per-capita basis. China is doing far better than the US on a per-capita count.
More productive people are allowed to pollute more because they create more good for the world like cures for cancer and the internet and machine learning.
That is solely because 1/3 of China's population is still living extremely impoverished lives that are equivalent to third world standards. They have 400-500 million people that are still among the poorest on earth. I can't imagine how you think that's an accomplishment that deserves recognition. Their low per capita pollution output due to extreme poverty, is not due to stellar environmental policies by China.
Even though it started lower, Europe has been reducing its emissions at a faster rate. In 2014, Europe was at 63% of its peak of emissions, whereas the US were at 72%.
The slope in log scale gives it away too (from the same data set, comparing US (orange) and Eurozone (blue) since 1971): https://i.imgur.com/099XLIw.png
you just gonna throw this out or will you back up your claims by some sources? because looking here[0] tells a very different story. while there has been a reduction since 1980, it has not been "more than any other country". and crucially, per capita emissions are pretty bad in the US.
According to Carbon Brief traded goods are 22% of emissions. 78% isn't "pointless" and there are things that can't be offshored like driving to work, running your fridge or heating your building.
That said, I agree with the trade system accounting for CO2 emissions.
