In the opening scene of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people. The devastation causes the world’s nations unite to combat climate change.
Fuck off
Why, it’s accurate, according to this
Cumulatively the US has contributed far more to climate change then any other country, and since there’s no major net carbon sink to offset historic emissions, cumulative emissions are what matters.
Most of that tonne of CO2 that was released from a factory in 1870 is still in the air today, warming the planet.
I mean, obviously this isn’t quite right, but also per person we are far and away the largest offender. But I agree, they can fuck off with pin the blame on the country: it’s just the wealthy elite - regular people aren’t doing much, it’s these rich fucks and their stupid schemes. Until we start putting the blame squarely on this group of people who have more power than any nation-state, we’re absolutely fucked.
Sounds like someone is jealous.
Yeah, it’s cherry picked data. Although perhaps the US as whole produces more ghg’s, per capita it comes in about fifth behind Russia, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia respectively (and first is “Middle East A” which is a cohort that includes Saudi Arabia for some reason).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions
*https://apnews.com/article/science-china-united-states-climate-and-environment-0ad4b8b987d74e15f7489c29371cbc83
^Where the claim comes from. AFAICT the claim focuses on consumption of products and includes the CO2 of creating that product (shipping as well?) to the states where it is then used. So, as China is one of the main manufacturers some/most of the carbon emissions created by those products is instead included in the United States emissions. In short, the US has the largest consumer base, so it has a larger carbon footprint.
The question I have then is; is this not included in the per capita data? I unno, and I don’t really care enough to find out.
https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/
https://globalcarbonatlas.org/
The claim is probably about historic cumulative emissions which the US exceeds China by 1.5 times
This IMO more accurately represents a countries contribution to climate change then the current years emissions since the CO2 from the past is largely staying in the air, heating the planet.