Leisesturm

Interesting. Did you see the graph or not. Do you think its fake news? China's main source of pollution is coal fired powerplants. The U.S. sees their coal use and raises them 300M gas and diesel engines. China is growing their car usage but they are bypassing the deep reliance on internal combustion that put the planet on life support. China is leading the world in the development of electric transportation. China, Japan, France and other countries have bullet trains that move huge swaths of the population at a fraction of the pollution of a jet airliner. The only quibble I have with that graph is that it projects US carbon emissions to fall and China's to increase. That graph did not anticipate the sea change in American climate posture and our rising carbon emissions profile and our refusal to take the lead in world negotiations on carbon control.

alan s 

You have to look at all pollution, not just greenhouse gases produced by people. The graph shows China’s greenhouse gas emissions 5x the US, and probably 6x or 7x now.

Leisesturm

If each American pollutes twice as much as each person in China and China has 5x our population they cannot pollute 5x as much as the U.S. Calm down. China is not the worlds problem by a long shot. We get all horrified by the size of their population and think they are just out of control breeding monsters but the truth is we are just as bad on the breeding end. The difference is we murder, execute, abort, have way more accidents, and cancer, which for all that pollution is still almost unknown in China, we have disease ravaging our population keeping it low. So don't let the numbers drive you crazy. All pollution? Are you sure you want to go there? The sheer sophistication of America's pollution makes it far more deadly than anything the Third World is producing. Our pollutants are insidious. They get everywhere and into everything. Including us. Every human being on the planet is radioactive thanks to American atomic testing in the 1940's. No other country has done as much nuclear testing as the U.S. and no other country exports as many nuclear powerplants and fissile material as the U.S. Our medicines wind up in oceans and groundwater and poison marine mammals and invertebrates alike. I thought this was all common knowledge.

alan s 

You may want to read up on the subject of cancer in China. And there are plenty of articles on the extraordinarily high levels of pollution in China. Maybe you are looking at data from the 1950s, but things have changed drastically since then.

Here’s something to get you started. https://www.boredpanda.com/pollution...mpaign=organic

noglider 

Folks, I hope I may say this as the originator of this thread. I think both of your points of view are valid even though they appear to conflict. Let's try not to be "right" above all else. Winning isn't everything. We can come up with constructive ideas which help many people if not everyone.

robertorolfo

And what do you think makes those French trains go?

I really don't understand some of the criticism of nuclear energy, as it is by far the best choice among the current options, and most certainly the way forward.

The future is ITER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER