One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.
“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.”
To solve the climate crisis the ~1 billion people in global north will absolutely need to significantly bail out the global South. There is no clear development path that doesn’t go through heavy fossil fuel usage, and it should go without saying we probably can’t even improve the living standard of another billion people, let alone seven billion without basically just giving them money and technology to skip the fossil fuel step. Countries in the global north have actually agreed to this framework, it’s just that noone has actually made good on the promise yet. So… not only is it not nonsense… it’s an active dispute between developed countries and developing countries.
China is not the global south, the hell are you on?
So you’re essentially saying exactly what I was criticizing at the very beginning, that China gets a free pass for their emissions and are entitled to pollute, that the climate will forgive them and the US will somehow magically save the day and bail out the second largest economy on the planet while China ramps up their own unsustainable consumer culture.
What are you knuckleheads going to be saying as China continues to shift from manufacturing useless shit for other countries and is instead producing the same shit for their own population? It’s literally already happening right this very moment. Is the climate going to give them a pass for those emissions too because “US bad”?
Your politics have made your conception of climate change completely incoherent. The climate simply does not care if China really really wants to be an empire and feels that they’re entitled to unsustainable growth. The gas they are producing in their country, both in manufacturing and in their other sectors, is the single largest concrete thing fucking the planet up. The US could finish switching their manufacturing chains away from China tomorrow and China would still be producing massive amounts of emissions.