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Climate Is Now a US Culture War Issue
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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I get the impression most people in US don't realize how severe the impact of the climate breakdown is going to be for them personally. A river in Colorado that around 40 million people rely on is drying up while California is running out of fresh water as well. Heatwaves resulted in massive crop loss in 2021, in 2022 farmers were killing their own crops and selling cows because of extreme drought , and this year farmers are set to abandon wheat crops at highest rate since 1917.
A paper from 2009 predicted that nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change, and we're now seeing this unfold in practice. US could easily end up in a dust bowl type scenario in the near future where food production collapses and a famine starts.
Then there are megafires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events like the recent Texas cold snap. All of this is putting stress on the failing infrastructure and straining supply chains to the breaking point. At some point there could be an internal refugee crisis within US as parts of the country become unlivable.
All of this is happening today, this aren't things that might happen in the future, these are existing crises that are becoming more severe every year while majority of the population doesn't understand the larger implications of what's happening.
If it was just the conservatives who suffered from this I would be 100% "let them die". Unfortunately the rest of us are stuck dealing with a global problem.
I still kind of think we should treat conservatives as the existential threat they are. Stop acting like it's "just a different opinion" and start taking action.
While conservatives outright reject that the climate crisis is happening, liberals tend to acknowledge it and simply pay lip service without putting any serious effort into dealing with the problem. US has made no meaningful progress in transitioning off fossil fuels so far, and continues to subsidize and expand fossil fuel projects under the democrats. There is no serious plan that's being implemented, and projects that do exist often amount to greenwashing.
We can see what a serious plan looks like by looking at China where majority of renewables are now produced and capacity is growing at an accelerating rate each year. China is also leading in nuclear power and building 150 new reactors now.
The US has actually cut its greenhouse gas emissions somewhat:
A few states have a lot of renewables in their electric supply mix. Here's California right now:
It's not enough to stabilize temperatures; that means actually getting to zero emissions worldwide, but it's a start.
It's important to keep in mind that US has moved out much of its manufacturing hen looking at these charts. To get the full picture we have to look at the global emissions produced when manufacturing goods and services people in US consume.
And then it's instructive to put the gains US made into perspective of what China managed to do. This is a great overview of the progress just this year alone https://nitter.net/KyleTrainEmoji/status/1680243524124516352
Fossil fuels now account for less than half of China's power capacity https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-zero-carbon-electricity
China is also doing huge amount of carbon capture via reforestation https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692
and it's now the global leader in renewable energy by a huge margin https://www.csis.org/east-green-chinas-global-leadership-renewable-energy
How is it that China is able to do these things while US cannot?
Basically, China had a bunch of industrial policy around capturing the solar manufacturing, and a willingness to use slave labor to undercut prices in the rest of the world.
It's worth nothing that trade doesn't make a huge difference to emissions.
That's a really dishonest framing of China's policies given that it's the one place in the world where wages are actually going up and poverty is being eliminated:
Labor in China is far from being cheapest in the world today, so your whole narrative here is based on a false premise.
What China had the willingness to do was to create a concrete plan to move off fossil fuels and then commit to implementing it long term.
Meanwhile, the relative difference is pretty significant:
And then we have to look at this in the context of per capita emissions which is even worse https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=USA~CHN
The key part in all this is that China is transitioning off fossil fuels while US keeps talking about it, while having done little tangible work in this regard.
They're specifically using forced labor from Uyghurs for solar manufacturing. It's a problem, and one that's complicating the ability of China to export solar panels.
There's no actual evidence for this claim. If you want to see actual forced labour then look at US prison system. US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and prisoners are used as literal slave labour. Meanwhile, the smear by US regime is also having very little actual impact on China's ability to export solar panels.
If it's not real, China can open up the region to outsiders, and let workers communicate freely without monitors present or spyware on their phones.
China has opened up the region to outsiders plenty of people have visited it including western news agencies. Here's one example. You're just regurgitating propaganda your regime is feeding you, there is no evidence for it. Meanwhile, we have lots of concrete evidence for precisely the sorts of atrocities US accuses China of happening in US. Maybe focus on what's happening in your own country.
Lol.
That's a great example of the language western propagandists like to use that resonates with people like you. However, once you read past the spin it's pretty clear that they're not able to find any tangible evidence of repression they're claiming. Of course, this kind of narrative works because Americans are primed to believe it without question. I guess thinking that China uses slave labour in Xinjiang is what helps you somehow rationalize why US isn't doing anything to transition off fossils.
Official policy of the United States is to actually get off fossil fuels
And legislation to get the country a chunk of the way there passed last year
So no, not nothing.
In actual tangible terms US has done very little so far, especially when compared to what China has done already.