• MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayOP
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    9 months ago

    Well, none of that matters anyways when China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the US and is basically single-handedly not just absorbing all the rest of the world’s reduction efforts, but increasing the global output enormously.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        While that’s efficient by comparison, the atmosphere doesn’t really give us a break for per-capita adjustments. Yes, the US is more irresponsible per capita and they need to fix that. However China gets more bang-for-the-buck in per-capita improvements when it comes to the actual environmental impact.

        Depends on whether we are talking about where to optimize for best impact, or whether we are talking about fairness of blame.

      • evranch@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Past emissions are just assigning blame, future emissions are all that matters. USA emissions have peaked, China is growing exponentially. That’s a problem.

      • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayOP
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        9 months ago

        That’s cumulative as in “from the beginning of time” (as far as we have record allowing us to estimate). It merely proves that the US has had a head start in all this because they industrialized at a large scale far earlier than China. But as you can see, China’s curve is literally steeper than anyone else’s, having already almost caught up to the EU in a mere 50 years.