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China’s Soaring Emissions Are Upending Climate Politics
(www.nytimes.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
Per capita they're still waaay lower than the USA. And they're implementing public transit and renewable power faster than most other countries.
That's not even considering how much Chinese manufacturing is solely for Western consumption.
China's per capita emissions are also waaay higher then those of the EU for example, while the EU's emissions are falling and China's are rising. Also China's emissions fall by about 10%, when you adjust for trade.
The big problem is more that the countries most responsible for climate change is changing. The West emissions are falling, whereas non Western countries emissions are rising. So the West argues that climate reparations should be paid by the countries emitting the most and not by the countries who have the most money. They are related, but not the same. Also that that bases needs to be adjusted over time.
When historically weighted. Currently China puts out much more per capita per year (8.4t per capita to Europe’s 5.6t). The US and Canada are still way above that, but they’re pretty consistently going down year over year while China is only going up.