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Thug Lessons posted:Also 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that aren't EU or America so the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore. Those countries also happen to be the best-equipped to cut emissions, and in fact they already peaked back in 2007. So when people push a belt-tightening line, what they're actually doing is foreclosing on third-world development, whether they realize it or not. Except in many cases those greenhouse gas emissions come from factories that are exporting everything they produce to the west.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:30
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Thug Lessons posted:Not as big a factor as you probably think. China, by far both the biggest emitter and biggest exporter outside the West, embodied about 16% of its emissions in exports. Even if you take the broadest possible definition of the West and measure carbon by consumption rather than emission to account for exports, you're still not going to get a scenario where the West emits a majority of GHG. China and the rest of the third world have significantly more people than the West. Canada, America and Europe combined have a slightly smaller total population than all of China. If we look at carbon emmissions per capita then the US produces just over twice as much as China.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:11
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Thug Lessons posted:Sure, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying given the total level of non-Western emissions, their projected rise over the next half-century, and the point I'm making about them. It's definitely true that the West emits more than its fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions, but at this point it's become a global problem that will be increasingly globalized as development in places like India and Brazil ramps up. Problems like climate change and resource depletion are real, but we've long passed the point where they can simply be reduced to a moral issue of "Western lifestyles". I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources. While we do need a global response to resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions it hardly seems unreasonable to say that the west has an additional responsibility to use resources efficiently and responsibly, given the disproportionate share of resources it consumes.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:02
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