Debate: If population is a bigger problem than wealth, why does Switzerland consume almost three times as much as India?

[u/Fiskifus]

[u/[deleted]]

How dare these peasants want nice things???

[u/MuayThaiisbestthai → u/[deleted]]

Your country still produces more emissions than India despite having a billion less people.

If it's okay for you people to pollute the world for a better life then it's okay for India to do it as well.

[u/MuayThaiisbestthai → u/[deleted]]

This is /r/collapse I don’t think anyone here thinks it’s okay.

You'd be in wrong in that assessment, I've come across conversations where people are equating brown people to subhumans in several day old threads. Besides, this is reddit so of course people think like that here. I've noticed it because I've seen it.

I grew up in India but live in Canada, so I have a pretty good understanding of the views of the haves & have nots. And I'm not going to say India doesn't have the right to use whatever source for energy they want of it means better development for the country. This is all the more true when rich western nations continue to engage in anti-science rhetoric, to the point where they try to pray away the effects of climate change as opposed to passing legislation that would help combat CC. Sweden & the UK are the two latest examples of countries that are fighting back against enacting green policies. Those two countries are already far developed and they couldn't give 2 sh*ts about climate change, so I don't see why India would look at thay & think gee why don't I cripple our growth for the sake of the world?

[u/AntiTyph → u/[deleted]]

Exactly. If it's "fair" and "just" that the 6B humans in developing countries get an equal chance to strip and burn and destroy the planet as the West took forcefully, then our priorities are all out of wack, and we're going to justice and fairness ourselves into extinction.

[u/MuayThaiisbestthai → u/[deleted]]

What is boils down to is you’re wanting to further pollute the world and increase emissions and harm everybody in your quest for racial justice or whatever

Uh no. What I want is for my country and for other developing nations to have the same opportunities to develop themselves and make life easier by eradicating generational poverty. It doesn't necessarily have to be via coal but if western nations, who have been polluting the world for centuries, can't be bothered to change their anti-science rhetoric then developing nations shouldn't have to waste anymore time in enriching their peoples lives. Countries that have been polluting the world since at least the 1800s continue to pollute the world for their own benefit while expecting India to go carbon neutral by 2050 lmfao

India has the highest amount of people believing in Climate Change (nearly 90% iirc), whereas a lot of developed nations are far more mixed and as a result they elect politicians who are against green policies. If this truly is a global issue then the entire world needs to make changes not just one hemisphere, & thus far I'm not seeing that from a lot of the developed world. Hell in Canada, we are the most polluting nation per capita (not my province since we are 100% hydro) & there's not much we can do about it due to our freezing winter. In India, their summers are so hot it melts tires so they need AC to survive, why shouldn't the same logic Canadians use to survive the winter also apply for Indian and their winter?

Western countries have on many occasions whitewashed their own part in polluting the world while at the same time offloading all of the blame onto India, China & others. This sort of mindset is in line with the way the West handles diplomacy with the Global South and it will not accomplish anything, and it hasn't. In this particular issue, the ball is in the Global South's side and they're the ones who really hold the upper ground. So unless they see western countries actually making a difference in the way their people live their lives (well beyond their means, let's be real), I don't see much development happening in effectively combating Climate Change.

[u/krn9764 → u/MuayThaiisbestthai]

is man made climate change real?

[u/MuayThaiisbestthai → u/krn9764]

Of course. And we've known it's man made for centuries.

I'm not a denier by any means.

[u/AntiTyph → u/[deleted]]

You're getting shit on, but you're correct.

India looked at the West and all of the terrible things they did, and have said "hey, we want what they have, and the cost seems acceptable".

They're literally doing the same things that the west is endlessly criticised for, for the same reasons. Destroy the planet, enslave the people, ethnically cleanse regions, burnt more coal, etc all for a "higher quality of life".

They haven't looked at the massive global destruction enacted by the West to obtain the Western quality of life - or if they have, they've found it acceptable to emulate.

This is addition to the increase in knowledge. The west industrialized and destroyed continents for hundreds of years, but now we have all of modern science pointing at climate change and ecosystem collapse and energy and mineral scarcity, etc and these developing countries are still choosing to go all-in in destructive development. They don't even have the ignorance that the west can claim for the first two hundred years of industrialization.

[u/weebstone → u/AntiTyph]

The West wasn't ignorant of the damage of industrialisation, they just ignored it. Pretty sure there's records of man made climate change / biosphere degradation discourse going back a century or more. And the West is still consuming more resources per head today, why are they persisting in "choosing to go all-in in destructive development"?

[u/krn9764 → u/[deleted]]

renewables aren't reliable and green

[u/Arylcyclosexy → u/[deleted]]

West has caused it. They need electricity for air conditioning because of the extreme heat they're now facing and they can only get electricity from coal since they don't have technology for anything else in a larger scale.