Joe Biden’s Climate Goals: That’s Not Enough, You Know – Column

In an overview article published by the New York Times on Thursday this week Newly Announced U.S. Government Climate Goals Under Joe Biden Published, Has a strange sentence: “Comparing national emissions reduction targets can be surprisingly difficult – depending on what year you start counting.”

This is a significant estimate for a publication Donald Trump Yet they want to take care of themselves without embellishing their own government. There is nothing difficult in comparing the CO₂ targets of different countries.

You should see the integer numbers. Well, the EU has not done that yet, and it could have reasons like the bizarre way the Biden government is counting: you do not see how bad things are – how much you blame yourself for this situation.

But let’s start with what Biden promised this week. 50 to 52 percent reduction compared to 2005 emissions. Why they are pulled United States – Justin Trudeau Canada Does 2005 make this the base year? Not like the EU in the 1990s?

Quite simply: the EU began to reduce its emissions before 1990; In the United States, the homeland of climate change deniers, they have continued to rise since the 2000s. 2005 was an interesting year for the United States because at that time the country’s emissions were at an all-time high – and it was the last year that the United States emitted more CO₂ than any other country in the world. In 2006, China took the lead.

The reduction targets in percentages representing different start dates are not comparable (but still often end up in the headlines). Published by USA in 2005 – In their own national territory alone, emissions are not included due to consumption elsewhere – 6.13 billion tons of carbon dioxide. By comparison: 27 EU countries together emitted 3.75 billion tons this year. (All numbers in this text are from OurWorldInData.com, the original source Global Carbon Project).

So the United States has chosen the starting point for its targets, which is the real, decisive goal – as far away as possible from zero COழ் emissions.

There are actually only three measurements that are relevant, and it is not “difficult”:

1. How much carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, and when?

2. How much CO₂ is it?

3. How much CO₂ has been released into the atmosphere so far?

First, for point 1

If you subtract 6.13 billion tons of CO₂ (US, 2005) or 50 percent of Python per year, you get 3.06 billion. According to its new voluntary commitment, the United States wants to reveal how much by 2030. For comparison: the starting point of the EU reduction targets for the 28 EU countries of today in 1990 4.47 billion tons.

The EU’s new target is 55 percent of this 4.47 billion tons. So it wants to dump only two billion tons by 2030. The United States’ absolute target (328 million people) is one-third larger than the European Union’s (448 million population), the total billion tons of CO₂. Climate researchers warn that the two targets are still not enough to coincide with the 1.5-degree target.

In the second point

Individual emissions are best viewed in terms of consumption, which means that not only domestic carbon dioxide production, but all exports and imports are offset against the respective CO₂ reserves and consequently allocated to the population. So there are emissions from T-shirts from Bangladesh and smartphones from South Korea.

As the matter is even more shockingly clear: the year 2018 fell to an American citizen More than 17.6 tons of CO₂. Unfortunately, these figures are not readily available to the entire EU, but let’s take Germany as an example: in 2018, our consumption-based CO₂ emissions were less than 10.4 tonnes each. In China it was less than 6.3 tons.

In 2018, the average American citizen generated almost three times more CO₂ than the average Chinese.

Moves a little in Russia

In this context, one must consider that Biden’s really provoked the most moderate austerity measures among the Republicans, the party of anti – climate change. Republican Senator John Barroso, for example, complained that “enemies of the United States, such as Russia or China, will continue to increase their emissions arbitrarily.”

As for Russia, this is simply nonsense: the change in the country’s emissions fluctuates to zero tons over the years, sometimes adding a few million tons, sometimes losing a few million tons. Unfortunately, Russia does not have any consumption-based statistics.

As is well known, China’s emissions are rising really fast, and the country has been emitting more CO₂ than anything else for 16 years. However, much of it is truly “ours”: China produces the goods that the West consumes. After all, China lags far behind the United States in terms of personal CO₂ debt.

This is more true than any other in terms of global climate justice.

Point 3: The ratio of CO₂ already released into the atmosphere by humans

They are looking forward to 2017 Statistics for historically integrated CO₂ emissions like this:

• United States: Nearly 400 billion tons

• EU (28 states): A good 358 billion tons

• China: Nearly 200 billion tons