I addressed that here
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You just said that you sacrificed a week of vacation to reduce dependence on big tech. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Some people choose to spend effort on tech independence. Some people focus on veganism. Some people make sacrifices for the environment. Etc. These are all choices.
The reason I'm not debating China's flavor of capitalism is because it's irrelevant. They don't get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.
And yes there's a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That's the trade-off everybody makes.
Bottom line is that China's emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place. For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030. The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.
And yes they perform a large portion of the world's manufacturing, this "shuffling" of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down. Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.
Everybody's economy is different, China is no snowflake. But I am not going to debate whether China's capitalism is "good capitalism" or not, that feels like pulling hairs and is a digression as you yourself said.
How much should China regulate? At the very least enough to stop the growth. I think that's a simple enough answer.
Everyone's continue to grow
Not true. The US and EU have been lowering emissions for the past 20 years.
I mentioned this in another thread which tried to use "emissions per capita", but that isn't a great metric because it is biased towards low productivity. We had very low emissions pre-1800s, for example. And North Korea has 4x less emissions per capita than China, are we supposed to follow North Korea's lead?
Also I hate how everybody constantly frames China as a poor helpless victim of capitalism. This was also mentioned in another thread here. China chose to shift to capitalism at the end of the 1900s. And they can choose to impose stricter regulation on fossil fuel emissions. They choose not to because it hurts their bottom line. Simple as that.
The US and EU have controlled their emissions, while China's continues to grow. China has the highest GDP in the world, and 7th highest GDP per capita, it has no excuse anymore.
China has all the hallmarks of capitalism - widening wealth gap, massive housing speculation, horrible working conditions, etc. If China gets to use dirty energy as a "short term strategy" with some vague promise to do better in the future, then why not the West? We could call all the evils of the world just "short term strategy".
To clarify, I'm all for fossil fuel regulation. The fossil fuel industry is different from most in that it has huge externalities, and those can only be controlled via regulation (as explained by Tragedy of the Commons). However, what I'm saying is that personal responsibility is still important. In fact, in a democracy it's basically all that matters. Whether you vote for public policy or you vote with your wallet, both have the power to affect change.
Changing the system and rerouting the paths and forcing everybody to follow, sounds nice in theory. And in this case I do agree that some regulation is necessary. However changing the system can end up enormously good and also enormously bad. It has both incredible power and risk. The problem is that nobody agrees on how to change it. Every few years the group in power changes, and reverses the policies created by the opposing group. I am not confident that this is as efficient as you say it is.
What I don't like about resorting to regulation, is that it's all or nothing. The policy passes or it doesn't. The free market is much more flexible. If 20% of people vote with their wallet, that wouldn't have been enough to get a policy to pass, but it sure is enough to get an industry to re-think their strategy and try to re-capture that 20%.
I'm sure you're joking but I do recommend reading Tragedy of the Commons, it's just a few pages long. Amongst other things, it talks about how regulations need to be applied everywhere for them to be effective.
The problem is that you won't be able to pull out a number that makes America/the west/Capitalism look good, because such a thing doesn't exist...so instead you just try to brush it off as "oh well our country is better because of this number".
You're contradicting yourself here. You're saying I can't pull out a number so I...pull out a number?
I'm not even clear what you're arguing here. My point is that the US and EU emissions have been declining for the past 20 years while China's continues to climb.
Is that scientific enough for you?
Why are you acting like China is a poor helpless victim to capitalism here. China chose to shift to capitalism at the end of the 1900s. And they can choose to impose stricter regulation on fossil fuel emissions. They choose not to because it hurts their bottom line. Simple as that.
The US and EU have controlled their emissions, while China's continues to grow. China has the highest GDP in the world, and 7th highest GDP per capita, it has no excuse anymore.
This is not a result of capitalism. It's simply the result of competition. Now if you want to erase country borders, that's a different discussion. But as long as one country doesn't regulate fossil fuel emissions, it doesn't matter what economic system they use, capitalism, communism, or whatever, they're going to be able to produce goods for cheaper. Because they're ignoring the real costs.
Information has tons of value. I'm not a fan of copyright but I also don't agree that physical products are inherently more valuable.
Also regarding insurance raises and other price raises. Prices usually rise when demand rises. So it's a measure of what people want. Much better than just measuring pure survival. Now if all prices rose, that would be inflation, and GDP accounts for that. But if the price of one product rises while the prices of others fall, that's just shifting consumer demand. Of course GDP isn't perfect since there can be monopolies, oligopolies, and state-controlled companies, but imo it's better than using population as a measure.
The point is that it's your choice where to make sacrifices for the causes you believe in. Everybody already knows that fossil fuels cause pollution, this is not some big secret. People don't just get to hide behind "brainwashing" as a defense.
Fossil fuel emissions are also a human construct. We did fine before fossil fuels, and even coal. Population is a horrible measure because all it captures is if you are keeping people alive. Even North Korea can keep people alive. But people want more than just survival.
But fine, you want to talk about population? You're ignoring the second example I brought up. The EU has 1/3 the population of China and 1/4 the emissions. In other words, China is still the problem.
Edit: I just did the calculation, and North Korea is 4x more "efficient" than China if we are using carbon emissions per capita. I don't think population is a great measure, to say the least
If you want to measure efficiency, population is not the way to do it, economic output is. After all, a person laying in bed does not contribute much to emissions, but also not much output.
The US has 3/4 the GDP of China with less than half the emissions. The EU also has 3/4 the GDP of China, but less than 1/4 the emissions. Both are far more efficient
Why are we blaming these companies when there's a much bigger contributor
You're the one being cynical, telling people they don't have personal responsibility
US and Europe carbon emissions have gone down in the past 20 years, while China's has grown rapidly. China accounts for %35 of the world's emissions. Of course lots of manufacturing for goods happens in China, but this just tells me that capitalism is not to blame here, China is. China needs to raise their carbon taxes. Or maybe manufacturing needs to come back to the US and Europe, where it can be properly regulated.
if it's impossible to affect change as a single person, then why do anything at all? Why bother to vote? I hear this logic all the time and it doesn't make sense to me.
- "Don't bother making personal changes, voting will save us!"
- people vote for Trump
- "Wait not like that"
That's not to say that public policy is pointless. "Tragedy of the commons" tells us that regulation is necessary. But I think the framing is wrong. The culprit here is not oil companies. It's oil. If you tell people "oil companies are evil", and tax the oil companies more, these people are just going to get mad when the taxes trickle down to them in the form of higher gas prices.
The correct framing is "Oil and gas cost more to us, than the cost of simply digging it out of the ground. The added taxes are to reflect the true cost". Then people will understand why gas prices need to go up.
Then add on some Infographics and memes that show how much more efficient public transit is. How solar panels pay off over the long term. Etc. Because personal responsibility does in fact make a difference.
this idea of "brainwashing" is a convenient way to dodge personal responsibility. Next time I think about returning the shopping cart I'll remember I'm "brainwashed" and leave it in the middle of the parking lot. I guess the US people who voted for Trump, are blameless because propaganda exists. I guess the people who use AI tools to write code or make art, are blameless because advertising exists.
We're on lemmy right now because we chose to be on it. It doesn't take an ultra wealthy person to do that.
If people don't want to bother putting in the effort, that just means it didn't really matter much in the first place. It's easy to just vote on policies that sound nice. But people have to actually try to implement those changes in their own lives, to see the actual cost, and whether the result is worth it. If enough people do so, it signals to the rest of the world that yeah, maybe this is a worthwhile change to implement worldwide.