US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1519

On June 01 2019 04:38 IgnE wrote:


And why is being “vague” about the “carrying capacity” somehow a problem, but alarmist conclusions that we are already over the carrying capacity is not? Because “carrying capacity” can and should imply the rampant burning of fossil fuels, strip mining, and whatever else as universally necessary conditions for sustaining global population? The problem is your framing of what “carrying capacity” means not mine. If you frame it that way you get led to some insane conclusions about how we should manage birthrates rather than about how we should manage natural resources.

On June 02 2019 00:30 Artisreal wrote:

Is that a serious question?
the last decades have shown that nothing is being done. Insofar it's all but "alarmist" to say we're flushing the earth down the drain and us with it. It's realist whilst the sustainable future is currently nothing but a pipe dream. Your current president is a clear cause and symptom of that fact.

Using the term carrying capacity in a way that includes unsustainable behaviour is false advertising.

On June 01 2019 17:34 GreenHorizons wrote:


straight to the "convenient bypassing" and "selective hearing and answering" I see. Well I for one learn from pretty much every poster, even the terrible ones.

That you're here to vent frustration rather than engage in dialogue is helpful information and probably why people will stop responding to you (or not do it at all).

For future reference you might want to just use the venting thread which is made for what you're doing in this thread instead. Just my $0.02

https://tl.net/forum/general/235432-the-letting-off-steam-thread

On June 01 2019 19:35 schaf wrote:
I read most of the thread and find xDaunts posts to be pretty informative. I'm not well versed in law neither German nor US American and I appreciate the counter balance. I don't believe all of them 1:1 and miss a human "Trump is a total jerk but he is right" now and then but I believe we should be thankful to have people from both sides posting here. Dialogue is always better than silence.

On June 02 2019 00:46 Nebuchad wrote:


Maybe IgnE would have us focus on the unsustainable behavior instead of the carrying capacity.

On June 02 2019 02:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
jimmy obviously I meant Indians as in people from India. It's a common theme among western politically minded people opposed to drastic measures that 'there's little point for western countries to reduce their emissions because those emissions will be counteracted by the expected increases by India/China anyway', then some version of 'we must find another way of dealing with climate change/the estimates for how damaging climate change will be are hugely uncertain and or exaggerated'. I mean realistically point 1 has quite some truth to it - China going from 2.6 to 8.7 tonnes of co2 per capita between 1990 and 2013 is basically the same increase as the entire europe going from 15 to 5 would be a decrease, and if we see a similar increase in India then the US going from 15 to 5 could similarly be considered inconsequential.

Silvanel I agree with that and obviously it's a simplification. People in colder climates can be expected to emit more per capita, but 2017 numbers were 15.7 tonnes of CO2 per year per capita for the US, and 1.8 tonnes CO2 per year per capita for India. Norway, as a cold, sparsely populated major oil producer, was at 8.8.

India doesn't need to get to 8.8, but the difference between countries here is not just electricity spent for heating during winter or a more meat rich diet or more cars used to drive due to people living more sparsely, it's also one of wastefulness, consciousness and luxury expenses. Norwegians have an average of 2 roundtrips by plane per year and we throw away 42 kilos food, etc, and the US obviously has massive opportunity for improvement. (And to be fair, there has been improvement - the US was at 20 in 2013).

(I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions. There might be some differences with how those two numbers are calculated meaning there's a slight discrepancy between the two, but the exact numbers isn't really the important point. People who want to look more into the evolution of emissions between countries should go here: gapminder. Actually people in general should just go play around a bit with gapminder. :D )

So just how much of U.S. carbon dioxide is exported to China?

That means the US accounted for roughly 5% of China's total Co2 emissions in 2012. In total, China exported products responsible for about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2012, about 16% of its total.

This figures not only make China look a little more virtuous, they erase almost all of the West's recent progress in cutting greenhouse gasses. Almost all of the emissions reductions that the U.S. and Europe have made since 1990 have been offset by outsourcing their emissions to places like China, according to the project's Global Carbon Budget 2014 report. What's more, these kind of outsourced emissions are growing at 11% annually.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently published complete 2018 export data for shipments of plastic waste (officially called “waste, paring and scrap”) generated in the U.S. and sent to other countries. As shown in Figure 1, 78% (0.83 million metric tonnes) of the 2018 U.S. plastic waste exports were sent to countries with waste “mismanagement rates” greater than 5%. That means about 157,000 large 20-ft (TEU) shipping containers (429 per day) of U.S. plastic waste were sent in 2018 to countries that are now known to be overwhelmed with plastic waste and major sources of plastic pollution to the ocean. The actual amount of U.S. plastic waste that ends in countries with poor waste management may be even higher than 78% since countries like Canada and South Korea may reexport U.S. plastic waste. The data also indicates that the U.S. continued to export about as much plastic waste to countries with poor waste management as we recycle domestically

Malaysia will send back almost 3,000 metric tonnes of non-recyclable plastic waste to countries including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom in a move to avoid becoming a "dumping ground" for rich nations.

Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin said on Tuesday that 60 containers stacked with contaminated waste were smuggled in en route to illegal processing facilities in Malaysia and will be sent back to their countries of origin.

To give ourselves a two-out-of-three chance of avoiding two degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, the new report says that 2030’s total emissions can’t exceed 42 billion tons of CO2 equivalent. This threshold represents about 80 percent of 2016’s carbon emissions, which totaled 52 billion tons of CO2 equivalent.

Pledges made under the Paris Agreement fall well short of achieving this goal. Even in a best-case scenario for existing pledges, global emissions in 2030 will fall between 53 to 55.5 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2030. That amounts to an overshoot of 11 to 13.5 billion tons, or more than twice the United States’ 2016 carbon footprint.

However, most of the largest emitting countries – including Canada and the United States – are not on track to achieve their current emissions targets, let alone adopt tougher ones as proposed under the Paris accord, the report said.

Based on recent trends, it now looks plausible that India could surpass those goals