The US should take steps to reduce carbon emissions. The US
is taking steps to reduce carbon emission but not enough. Not nearly enough. This is my single biggest complaint against the American Right. Most high profile political figures refuse to even acknowledge carbon emissions are a problem.
I still think China is the world's worst polluter. They have about four times the population of the US so by this graph, they produce more carbon in total.
The US is taking steps to lower the carbon footprint of the middle class. The CCP is trying to grow their middle class (a worthy goal) but they are not trying to tamp down on carbon emissions while doing so.
Note a majority of China's population is living in poverty barely making anything. If you look at China's elite population, they are probably producing more carbon than most Americans.
Second I would point out that carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant there is. China's water, air, and soil is all pretty toxic. The skies are only blue when the CCP orders cars and factories to cease for a few weeks for PR photo shoots. A friend of a friend lives in South Korea. South Korea, not North Korea. According to this person, the pollution for China is so bad that the snow that falls in South Korea is yellow.
Chinese mines spew all sorts of toxins everywhere. Chinese fishing vessels metaphorically rape the seas strip mining the fish so that they cannot recover. Most fresh water fish are all dead or too toxic for humans to safely to eat.
China has virtually no birds in it. Other critters are uncommon. The CCP only puts resources to conservation when there is a political aspect to it like with pandas. Pandas are very valuable for diplomacy.
Also, the CCP lies. It's not just on the top. The local offices will doctor bad statistics for the regional offices. The regional offices will doctor bad statistics for the national offices. The national CCP will then doctor the statistics they publish to the Chinese people and the world at large.
I doubt China emits 16.5 metric tons of carbon per person like the United States does but I would bet money they emit more than the officially reported statistic of 7.5.
The CCP lies about the number of street crimes, suicides, industrial accidents, automoble accidents, Covid deaths, infant mortality, lung cancer, political detainees, force labor statistics, and construction mishaps, and intellectual property thefts.
They are probably lying about their carbon emissions too.
If the entire human race stopped burning fossil fuel entirely. The amount of greenhouse gases are such that the average global temperature would still keep rising. That means we cannot fix the problem by reducing emissions.
Reducing emissions is a good idea for the secondary benefits alone. Renewable energy creates jobs and reduces our dependence on foreign fossil fuel markets, but I believe we need a technological solution to carbon emissions.
As a child, I believed that planting trees would solve this problem. After all, plants suck up carbon dioxide from the air. Planting trees and saving the rain forest were hugely popular in the 1990s. Polluting corporations really supported the idea that we could fix everything by planting lots of trees and not changing our lifestyles dramatically.
I believed, erroneously, that oil and coal was constantly being replenished. It was just being replenished at a
much slower rate than we were using it.
What I learned only a few years ago is that most fossil fuels we have today was formed in the Carboniferous Period. The bacteria that helps wood decompose did not exist yet. So trees and tree-like plants would suck in carbon dioxide and then the plants would die, and get compressed underground eventually becoming fossil fuels.
Now if a plant removes carbon dioxide from the air, the plant, it's a temporary solution. Most of the carbon dioxide will re-enter the air when the plant dies and is decomposed (or when the plant is eaten and turned into poop which then decomposes).
We need some kind of method to capture carbon dioxide and trap it in solid form mimicking what happened in the Carboniferous Period.
I don't know how we could do this effectively. I am pretty sure that the first people to come up with a way to do this will emerged from a capitalist economy, not a state planned economy.
In the short term, I think we should take a second look at nuclear power plants. They create virtually zero carbon emission and produce a lot of power in an economical setting. The only problem s the threat of meltdowns (which modern technology has more or less solved) and nuclear waste. We have earthquake-free deserts to store our radioactively waste in the United States southwest, but the NIMBYs are roadblocking it.
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