finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They also expanded coal power, roads, and removed their population limiting policies, though. They produce about 3 times as much CO2 per person as India, Indonesia, and many South American nations, likely many nations in Africa as well but theres a lot of missing data.
nednobbins@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Pollution per GDP is a better measure. ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.
Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.
China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.
They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.
They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why is Polution per GDP a better measure? I don’t care how much they export when they’re killing the planet at a faster rate every year with no intentions to stop it.
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
It’s a better measure because western countries outsource manufacturing and associated pollutions to other countries and then pretend to be green.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And China is continuing to increase market share on goods like electronics and vehicles, by choice.
The USA has the highest GDP in the world and has a CO2 per GDP of 0.26 to Chinas 0.44. Are you saying China is just pretending to be green and the USA is a beacon of hope for the environment?
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They wanted a measure that makes China look better.
nednobbins@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.
It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.
Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.
I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.
nednobbins@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That’s lower than the US or Europe.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They’re attempting to raise the replacement rate to maintain their still massive population. It is problematic.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Pollution per GDP is a bad measure. Mali has a high CO2 intensity, but the GDP per capita is low, so pollution is low. The best measures are emissions per capita in consumption and production terms. China is not a saint in either of those metrics, being rather close to the EU in both of them today.
nednobbins@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.
I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.