this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I'm not American. Stuff Biden does seldom reaches here. I just have to go with whatever I hear when I enter the country. I was under the impression fxck-all was happening, and that China was the only one seriously making progress on their green goals. Lord knows Europe's been slow af.
The estimates from before passage looked like this:
And per this article, we're likely doing better than the pre-passage estimates.
China by contrast has had increasing emissions over the past several years:
Those increases by China are used by opponents of climate action to argue that it's not worth doing anything, when every country needs to get to the same emisisons: zero or less.
Was actually not aware that emissions have gone down. Much more used to the US not doing anything or actively screwing people over (such as the arrest of Donziger) but at least it's going down.
China has been doing thins to curb emissions and generally fix the environment like the Gobi tree wall. Course there's plenty more that could be doing but I digress.
It is; things could be worse than they are. The problem is that both absolute and per-capita emissions are going up, to the point where China crossed over to be the largest emitter on a national-total basis, and we're at the point where they need to be going down.
Per capita CO2 emissions in 2021:
Change in % since 2011:
In other words Europe is pretty fast in reducing emissions, from a higher then global average. China was well below global average and has increased emissions by a lot. Seriously the EU has some pretty good laws to reducing emissions and is besides Latin America one of the regions with the best relation between quality of life to emissions. France and Spain even have per capita emissions close to the global average.