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account42 | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
Emissions in the US are pretty much negligible compared to China and India. It would have to be a radical shift that is going to take way more than four years to make US climate policy even relevant to the planet as a whole.
dtquad | parent | next
In emissions there is just China and then the US as a somewhat distant second. But to be honest the whole world is using China as their factory.

Europe and India are the regions that are actually surprisingly negligible. Africa and the rest of the developing world doesn't make a blip.

palata | root | parent
You need to account for indirect emissions. Because all the factories are in China means that China emits more, but those iPads are not being sold and used in China.

When you import goods, you import their emissions. It's just super hard to measure (and we like to blame it all on China).

belorn | root | parent
The solution there is to create tariffs based on emissions so that the costs of the emissions get accounted when people import goods.
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ninetyninenine | parent | next
US is not negligible. They are number 1 per capita.

China just had an astronomically high population. They will always be higher overall due to this.

An actual measurement of this needs to be performed capita.

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belorn | root | parent
If the issue is emissions per capita then the solution is simply to increase the population faster than the increase in emissions.

Similar, countries with aging population will see an increase in emissions per capita regardless if they are actually decreasing emissions, as long the population loss is greater than emissions decreases.

throwaway4220 | parent | next
If the tariffs are as agressive as promised china may drop its emissions? I don’t know what hope to hold onto anymore.
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billyoyo | parent
What are you talking about? The US has the 2nd heighest emissions behind China, almost double India's. The only countries higher than it per-capita are Canada, Australia and petro-states or tiny countries.

And China is already leading the world in moving to renewable technology, they are moving in the right direction (not entirely for altruistic reasons - it fulfils their ambitions of energy self-sufficiency).

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somerandom2407 | root | parent
Why cherry-pick per-capita when what matters to the climate is actual output, not output per capita. Lets take Australia, as an example, their total co2 output is around 1% of the world's co2 output. If Australia ceased producing all of its co2, it wouldn't make much difference at all. Per capita figures are just a waste of everyone's time.
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fastball | root | parent | next
I always try to convince people the best metric is CO2/land area. It actually adjusts for the size of your country without the silly idea that having more people means your country is doing "better" from an emissions perspective.
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