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Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Seems a bit silly to decide that "capitalism" is the majority contributor to climate change when the country that produces the most greenhouse gases is only "pretty capitalist" doesn't it? If capitalism is the major contributor, why don't more capitalist country produce more greenhouse gases?
I never set out to argue that capitalism doesn't exist in countries that aren't primarily capitalist.
That's not necessarily the case. The pollution comes from where manufacturing is, not necessarily where consumption is. The demand is coming from capitalist countries.
Edit: To account for this, we can look at per-capita consumption-based emissions (thanks to @boonhet@lemm.ee for the data link).
The country that produces the most greenhouse gases is doing so to satisfy the demands of private industry that's producing goods for private profit. What part of that is not capitalism?
Also the country that produces the most per capita, is arguably the most capitalist country, the USA.
While I agree that per capita emissions is a useful metric, perhaps even more useful than raw emissions numbers, where are you getting that the USA has the highest production per capita?
This table shows data from 2018 so things change, but the per capita emissions would have had to double in five years to put the USA on top.
If you look at the non-per capita numbers, the USA is the second largest emitter behind China (using data from 2018).
Good point, I was a bit inaccurate with my last comment.
If you look at the non-per capita consumption based emissions and divide that by the amount of people, you'll find that Americans consume way more per capita.
China has the bigger (even per capita) number in terms of production, but they export a lot of what they produce, whereas Americans get all their shit from China and can then claim China has the worse emissions.
Here's a map showing consumption-based emissions per capita, you can see that the US has a number twice as big as China's.