> Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth.
If you think quarterly reporting 'season' is crazy now, wait until it becomes semi-annual and the pressure is really on to hit analyst numbers. It'll be like New Year's Countdown on Results Release Day.
I'm fairly skeptical of the findings, as the majority of the research and writing was done by Claude Opus. I'd be more likely to believe groups like AIPAC are behind this - they have poured a lot of money into online censorship legislation.
The top three emissions sources are industry, electricity, and transportation. There have been important federal and state-wide attempts to address these, but Trump guts regulation every time he's in office. Chevron is dead, SCOTUS repeatedly rules to let big business do whatever they want, and we're now burning even more coal to meet AI energy demand.
Compare this to China, where the government is aggressively promoting green energy and electric car tech.
This is deflecting the problem. All of those are in response to demand. People live in suburbs instead of centrally so they need all their own personal transportation and product transportation. They want all their clothing, toys, BBQs, lawn chairs, smokers, jacuzzis, tents, gadgets, etc so both demand for industry and demand for transportation to bring that stuff to them from all over the world. And, they want all the electricity for their large 2200 sq houses (double the size of many other countries).
China is the number one burner of coal and other dirty fuels and only growing. This type of disingenuous analysis really sets the wrong understanding of the world.
China has 4x our population and emits 1/3 less per capita. They've also been flat or falling for the last 21 months. US emissions rose by 2.4% last year.
Furthermore, because carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, one should also note that the US is responsible for more than a quarter of cumulative emissions, twice as much as China.
I'm more interested in solving the problem than assigning blame, but it baffles me when people argue that we shouldn't need to focus on this because it's really China's fault.
Soon, we'll have millions of climate change refugees, battles over resources, regular once-in-a-century storms, more wars. We're close to the point where we'll be too busy thrashing to address the root cause.
Over the past century, the US has produced more cumulative carbon emissions than any other country, and it's not even close.
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
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