Xi is pushing climate, study shows
Enabling climate acceleration are economic sectors such as land use, China coal, Saudi Aramco, Coal India, Gazprom (Russia), National Iranian Oil — in that order.
Since 2021, China coal sends more carbon in the air than NATO equities and Arab states combined. The China coal sector is increasing capacity and is delivering 12.7 GtCOe in 2024.
The #GreenhouseForcing results are published at: http://data.yt/projections/2024-results.html @climate
This is a situation where the conclusion you can draw is based on the metric you choose. If you instead choose GHG per unit GDP, they’re far worse than the US. That’s a measure that’s less diluted by their vast population.
Why should how wealthy you are factor into how much you pollute? Per capita is the only sensible measurement here.
The idea is GDP is a measure of activity. So using per GDP allows you to see the efficiency which you are producing “value”. That’s not a terrible idea in general but it accepts a very narrow definition of value.
GDP is a really flawed measure of how well a society is performing. I wonder what it would look like if we used Gross National Happiness or Total Quality Life Years. Could also think about ecosystem health or biodiversity as a valuable output of a country but that’s highly linked to CO2 emissions so wouldnt be meaningful.
Also worth saying whilst per capita is absolutely important as a measure for us to understand the performance of human economic systems the earth systems only respond to gross total emissions.
Creation of value means nothing in the context of climate change. The atmosphere doesn’t say “you’re less at fault because you made so much value for the shareholders”.
The only measure that means anything is absolute emissions, full stop.
I acknowledged this in my last paragraph. We should care about value though and we need to fight for that value to be something positive and meaningful (human and non-human health and wellbeing is a good start imo) not just shareholders.
Ultimately, there is a lot flawed in carbon accounting systems but we do need measures that allow us to assess if individuals, organisations and nations are doing enough and importantly articulate what pathways to zero emissions look like and that does mean trying to work out which processes are producing something we want with low or no emissions or not.
I guess it should be the other way around. More money (per person) means you should be able to afford reducing GHG. For example by better isolating your home, using cleaner sources of energy or constructing more power efficient machines.