[anthuman]

EU didn't reduce anything. The just shifted a significant part of their emissions to china. Just like they shifted a ton of their plastic and garbage to china.

Most of china's emissions, pollution, environment damage has been to manufacture goods for EU and the US. Europe and the US are responsible for most of the pollution and emissions. It's the price for a high standard of living in a consumer economy. It's why chinese cities and rivers are polluted and why american and european cities and rivers are clean.

But going forward, as china shifts from a manufacturing to a consumer economy, they are going to be responsible for a tremendous amount of emissions themselves. And the manufacturing will shift to poorer/cheaper ASEAN countries or India and eventually africa. What happens after that, I haven't a clue. The global economic system has been to exploit cheaper labor. What happens when the last cheap labor source has been exploited?

If the chinese want to live like an american or a european, then the environment is going to suffer. Then India, ASEAN and africa would want to live like the chinese. Then the environment is going to suffer even more.

It's a hard sell to get the west to lower our standard of living. It's an even harder sell to tell the developing world to accept their lower standard of living.

[wtdata]

It's the new-age version of the Western exceptionalism: Everything that happens in the world - as long as it is bad - should be attributed to the West.

Most people pretending to care about the environment, aren't really interested in protecting the environment from those that destroy it at all, they are just interested in - by any way - attack the foundations of Western countries so that they can build their dystopian dream from its ashes.

Of course that while they do that, China, and soon India, will pollute so much that will make it extremely difficult to live in here. But, that's really a small price to pay to make the West pay for their sins of the past - real or imaginary.