[cdrini]

> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.

I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.

Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?

[lukeschlather]

I think you have to define what you mean by "less concerned." I'll take a stab at it, which is that Chinese energy use has grown 7% while US energy use has remained roughly flat. The reason I say that this only works because you devalue Chinese lives, is because Chinese energy use remains less than half (possibly even less than 1/3rd by some measures) what it is in the US per person. If the US reduced energy usage by 10% and China's grew by another 10%, it would still be the case that Chinese people relatively speaking are living in conditions that we in the US would consider extreme hardship, as a direct result of having less energy.

Essentially you're saying that the US should bully the Chinese people into increasing hardship because it's the only way to meet our climate goals.