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Researcher: The US Owes the World $4 Trillion For Trashing the Climate
merbs writes: Climate change wasn't created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed most of the pollution and gone way over their carbon budgets—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So should rich countries pay up? Researcher Damon Matthews has quantified how much historically polluting nations owe their global neighbors—and it's a lot.
What's marxist about it? You break somebody's window, you have to pay them for the repairs. You poison somebody else's garden, you pay for having it replanted. This is pure capitalism and the very model libertarians propose.
FWIW, This analysis only covers CO2 emissions since 1990, not pollution in general.
What mostly saves china in this cursory analysis their CO2 emissions per capita.
Although china has lots of CO2 emissions (30%), it also lots of people, when you divide it out compared to the US (15%) and EU (11%).
If, however, you compare thing per GDP (adjusting for purchasing power parity in respective localities), thinks look a bit different.
China: 650 kg CO2/1000 USD
Russia: 530 kg CO2/1000 USD
USA: 330 kg CO2/1000 USD
EU: 220 kg CO2/1000 USD
As others have explained, burning wood can be carbon neutral. And as I just told Jane, the only real caveat here is significant land use change, like deforestation. I've also told Jane that in the 1990s, the upper bound on CO2 emissions due to land-use changes was less than half of the lower bound on those due to fossil fuel emissions.
This can be confirmed using simple accounting or by using 14C isotope ratios. Burning wood releases unstable 14C carbon because it hasn't had time to decay, but there is no 14C in coal. So we actually have several independent ways to see that Jane Q. Public and John O'Sullivan are wrong when they keep blaming developing countries for supposedly emitting "far more" CO2 than developed nations:
I've already told Jane this is nonsense, but he refused to retract this Sky Dragon Slayer claim and keeps blaming developing countries for supposedly emitting "far more" CO2 than developed nations. Once again, John O'Sullivan showed the part of Figure 3 with the net fluxes in July 2009 but "forgot" to show the fluxes for the rest of the year. Since July is summer in the northern hemisphere, those trees grow leaves which temporarily removes CO2 from the atmosphere. But this reverses during winter, which might be why John O'Sullivan "forgot" to show those fluxes. "Principia Scientific International" and several others repeated O'Sullivan's misinformation.
Ironically, when one isn't talking to Sky Dragon Slayers like John O'Sullivan, it isn't controversial to note that developed countries are responsible for most of the CO2 rise. Here's an interactive tool to explore historical CO2 emissions
The flip side is that those past producers created more efficient means that the new producers can simply purchase wholesale. China didn't have to develop industry using old-school, more polluting methods, they have all the newest methods available already, so they can just slot themselves in at the front. Same with Africa.
The clearest example of this is with cell phones, Most developing countries seem to be skipping straight to 3 or 4G, bypassing all the intermediate steps. Some places in Africa I've heard you CAN'T get landlines, but cell phones are common.
We did all the development, so they get to reap the rewards.
Biomass (what you're referring to) only makes up for a very small proportion of energy consumption. It's actually considered to be 'low carbon' because if those plants weren't harvested then they'd decompose on the forest floor anyway, producing CO2. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, mature forests don't act as effective carbon sinks. Only newly-growing forests have the ability to sequester significant amounts of carbon. Burning biomass is only carbon positive if it results from clearing forests and preventing new growth. The time scale of this new growth is measured in decades (i.e. it's in the global carbon cycle already), whereas fossil fuels represent carbon that has been stored up for millions of years (carbon that is being newly introduced into the biosphere).
So long story short, stop making up excuses and face up to reality.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Any data model that puts the U.S. at $4 trillion in the whole and China in the black regarding pollution is incredibly inaccurate, especially since the dates measured are after both the U.S. and China industrialized. One set is from 1990 to 2013 and still shows China in the black.
This is sensationalist journalism posing as science. The publication itself looks to target wealth as an indicator of carbon emissions. Its abstract is clearly biased which is just bad science. The article by Brian Merchant is just terrible. I tried reading it and its just slander. The guy touts himself as "Apocalypse spotter, utopianist, science fictionalist." Seriously, this whole article is just a big pile of crap.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.