• Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    2 things about this; the planet don’t care about per capita numbers - 52.2 is gonna drop that population real quick. I doubt that would even slow their ruling class down

    Second fuck is America a bad comparision. Those 2 will race to a scorched earth quicker than a nuclear war ever could

    • cyd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Per capita numbers are very, very important: they tell us where the low hanging fruit are. The people emitting the most per capita should be pressured most heavily to reduce emissions, because they’re the ones who are polluting most unnecessarily.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Except we’re also setting high temperature records in Canada.

          Even with that, it still pisses me off when I hear my fellow Canadians (mostly from a certain province that exports fossil fuel) saying “why should Canada do anything when these other countries are worse”.

          • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Ok, doesn’t change that we need a ton of heat in the winter. An average 1.5 C change doesn’t matter much when we have to heat from -20 to +20, a delta T of 40 degs.

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        In a perfect democracy perhaps, but in the world we live in the power is in the hands of very few. Id also argue there’s too much noise using it to represent unnecessary pollution, as a single person running a generator in antartica would be horrible per capita - but quite so necessary. Larger populations have the benefit of larger systems, thereby operating more efficiently. A country could also reasonably just triple their population to increase their pollution “quota”, cause money - and a system that can be that manipulated isnt that reasonable of a system.

        Looking directly at pollution on the other hand is more like looking directly at what causes the problem (climate change), and minimizing centralized sources of it would have a much more noticable effect. Especially those that have a greater population to landmass ratio (thereby having less untouched human areas) and so less so a positive effect on greenhouse gas removal.

        • cyd@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Let’s frame this in inequality terms. Suppose (not the real numbers) we have the top 1% emitting half the greenhouse gases to fuel their lifestyles, and the bottom 99% emit the other half. You’re saying we should focus equally on the two groups when looking for emissions reductions???

    • JohnEdwa@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Exactly, the world doesn’t care. The average co2 footprint per person globally is around 5 tonnes and as we’ve noticed, that is way too much for our planet to handle, one estimate is that we would need to drop that to below 2.5 tonnes.
      China at 7.5 per person is a lot closer to than Canada at 18, Australia at 17, US at around 15 or Russia at 12. EU on average is close at around 8 I believe.

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        No way canada’s that bad? Thats a perfect example then cause were mostly hydroelectric, just empty as ass (an example I used to the other person is imagine the per capita numbers of an artic exploration group, probably horrible but we could never visit the artic again and still be boiling in superpowers pollution)

          • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Whoops shoulda been a little more specific, I meant because most gas based generators arent nearly efficient as coal based plants (which aint as efficient as nuclear…) in terms of emissions to energy. That added on the fact that they’re probably not designed for sub zero temps and you end up with a horrible per capita (probably, I don’t have any actual numbers to back this up).

            Ngl im not too great at expressing my whole thought processmao

        • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Oh we’re pretty bad. Cold winters we need lots of heat. Big houses. Mostly car dependent inner infrastructure. Lots of distance for goods to travel and we still use trucks for it. BC and Quebec may have lots of hydro but that’s not the rest of the country.