On the other thread you brought up lowering the speed limit as one way to reduce CO2, and something that could be done right away. I suspect there would be howls of outrage if that was done. I would be willing to do that.
I think the speed limit is an excellent example of the headwinds to acting on CO2 reduction even though it does reduce consumption of fuel at no cost out of pocket.
mass extinction is coming it’s called nuclear war.
“Government over-reach!”
You’d do what about China and India?
Top ten in 2020 numbers are in million tons CO2
China is pushing EV development and auto battery production. They are addressing the transportation slice of the carbon pie. They see the profit to be made. Their big polluter is carbon fired coal plants.
Regardless of what China and Indian do we can make an impact by reducing what we produce since we are the second largest CO2 polluter in the world today.
You are asking the wrong person on how to deal with China. I’m not qualified in diplomacy. However, they are pragmatic and intelligent, and quite capable of seeing what the CO2 is doing to the climate and how it is impacting them. I suspect we will see many countries react sooner than it appears we will.
Yes, China is by far the biggest CO2 polluter. How to put pressure on Chian is hard to do if we aren’t meeting goals to reduce CO2 output. However, one way to do that might be to keep Chinas oversized percent contribution to the problem in the worlds public eye. It would be an advantage if we were reducing ours as we did so.
If you add up the total of anthropomorphic CO2 added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution started China has only pumped half the amount, we have over that time period. So, both countries bare the largest responsibility for reducing it.
nobody knew during the industrial revolution. This is now not 200+ years ago.
if you have no economy or a weaken one by reducing carbon China will bury the USA. No strong economy no strong military.
Tax Chinese imports big time till they fall inline. You want to pay 2-3 times or more for everything? China has said yes on every agreement then just breaks it.
biggest threat nukes. To many nuts have them. Your in a knife fight for your life, your losing would you pull out the gun you have?
They think we’re stupid or naive and we keep electing people to prove it.
Yes. the US has reduced the amount of CO2 the most and when compared to the other counties on the link to the graphics it is impressive.
So, let’s take a look at the amount the US has been producing since 1990 to 2019. I will add the link below.
The annual CO2 emissions in 1990 was 4,844,520 and 2019 4,817, 720 both are at roughly the same value. In 2000 it had risen up to 5,775,810 and stayed fairly level until 2007 at 5,736,319 when we did start reducing CO2 emissions. We were still emitting at roughly 1990 levels in 2019 thirty years later. And we are still the second leading CO2 polluter in the world. Yes, we are showing progress in reducing CO2, and it doesn’t seem to have impacted our economy which is still the strongest in the world. We need to continue doing so and try to become carbon neutral sooner rather than later.
U.S. Carbon (CO2) Emissions 1990-2023 | MacroTrends
Our metric tons per capita of CO2 emissions have gone done from 20.47 in 2000 to 14.67 in 2019. that is a good sign. In 2023 China’s per capita CO2 emissions are 7.8 and we stand at 13.0.
CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) | Data (worldbank.org)
I can’t control China’s decisions, but I can try and do something here in this country.
as they bury the USA economically then militarily.
i don’t want to live like the average people in china.
Not at all. I’m just wondering out loud if we humans can successfully battle our innate desire to reproduce a lot. Killing one another is a bad thing. Having one child instead of nineteen is a very good thing for the planet… in my humble opinion.
We’re much closer to people only having one child than 19, and in reality having only one child would result in declining populations. According to this link, the replacement rate, in other words the rate to maintain the population, needs to be 2.1 children. Some countries are below this rate and are facing a variety of economic issues.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Yet again another graphic. This goes all the way back to the last interglacial period. Notice how the red line representing postindustrial temperatures at the far left goes straight up on this time scale. This rapidity of change is what makes it hard for life forms to adapt too. Add to that the changes and speed of human behavioral adaptations driving land use, commercial fishing, and increasing pollution of land, air, and sea, and you have a perfect storm impacting life on this planet and driving a potential mass extinction. This has been what I have been posting about. The balance of nature that is maintained by a complex web of life is what makes the planet livable. We have an atmosphere that is largely created by life on this planet.
Now take a look at the line extending above the red line on this time scale appearing to go straight up, by 2300. I realize to us living now another 277 years seems to be a long time, but in evolutionary terms it doesn’t amount to a blink of the eye. Before that blink even gets started, we will be in uncharted planetary temperatures until we go back in time about 50 million years to the Pliocene epoch. The rapid change of temperature on this scale will seriously test the adaptive capacity of all life on earth.
Why a Dig Into Earth’s Climate History Has Scientists Deeply Concerned (inverse.com)
Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates | PNAS
The reply was to Rex and his assertion was that the only way to stop population growth is if we start killing each other. Of course education is a key factor not just of women but of everyone.
That doesn’t mean there could or will not be other methods of driving the population lower. Honest good people find such things as human eugenics off limits now but there was a point in history it seemed the thing to do and making a resurgence in some cultures. It is also an unintended outcome of our own culture. People that go on to higher education meet and marry others they associate with that have similar backgrounds and maybe they have less babies. Other less educated groups your words not mine have greater numbers of babies. Kind of the reverse result we intend.
Access to education even in our country is not universal even starting at kindergarten on up. Allowing 5-10 million people to move here each year with no plan on what they will do here or who they are also isn’t helping us solve these problems of climate or education.
don’t worry annuals are now perennials on Long Island. That’s something good no?
By the way we are all in this together. It is a serious topic. It is in my view imperative we come to a planetary consensus and act together. Yes, the bill we have to pay to stop what we are doing now will be hard. I would hate to see life on our planet go bankrupt because we just kept borrowing against time.
So true. The Congressional Budget Offices says the 2021 birthrate in the US was 1.66. It is expected to rise to 1.75 by 2030 and stay there until 2053. Other countries (Japan, 1.34; Italy, 1.24; South Korea 0.84) are seeing even lower birthrates. it’s hard to see how countries that depend on taxes paid by the working age population to fund social programs (primarily retirement and heath care) will cope without making very unpopular choices. The popular expectation that taxes should always go down and benefits should always go up will become even more difficult to reconcile with reality.
I’m reminded here of a conversation I heard on the radio the other day. A fellow who was involved in urban planning in Utah was speaking of the situation of his town. It was from an area where folks move to for the mountains, skiing, hiking, mountain biking - natural beauty.
A long time resident spoke at a town meeting there. The fellow, to establish his creds as an upstanding tax-paying resident, announced that he had lived there for decades. He’d raised four children there. They, too, we upstanding tax-paying citizens, had built homes and lived in the same community. He had ten grandchildren.
And he wanted to know what was being done to stop this urban sprawl that was ruining the natural beauty of the community they all loved.
Sounds familiar somehow…
At some point we’re going to have to actually decrease our populations if we’re to survive and live in something like a habitable planet, a planet shared with most of the wonderful diversity of life that we have been blessed with? Addressing this seriously sooner would be better. Consuming less will become necessary for many of us. The issue seems to be how we can we do so and still maintain, and hopefully expand to the less privileged, a decent standard of living to as many people as possible. (How many cars have each of us owned in our lives? Does that seem excessive. or would it to most people in other parts of the world? Has that really been necessary to our happiness, or could we have found some way around it?)
So can an economy grow while a population decreases? Has that ever been done for any length of time before? Can we still be happy with less economic growth? Is it worth it to avoid (or minimize) another mass extinction event. Is it already too late?
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Ed Abby
Agree 100%. I focused on women only because they have historically been denied equal access to education in many societies and it takes a couple of generations to catch up. Unfortunately, a few (Afghanistan, for example) are still going backwards.
Don’t we hear constant stories about how much stuff everyone has? Books that tell you how to de-clutter your home and simplify your life are super-popular, so it seems an obvious inference that many Americans, middle class and up, could simply buy less stuff. Buying less stuff (often plastic, often made in China, often designed to break or become useless after only a few uses) would be an easy way to reduce carbon footprint.
Buy less stuff. Eat less resource-intensive meat. Eat more locally produced food when you can. Drive less. Would any of these measures make anyone appreciably less happy?
