“China Deserves All The Blame”
Carbon emissions have been on a crazy high climb for the past few decades, thanks to the rapid explosion of mass production and global megacorporations like Amazon creating more pollution faster than you can say, “Alexa, guillotine Jeff Bezos.” Carbon dioxide has reached unprecedented levels and is at an all-time high. Who’s to blame for this all? Well if you take statistics from popular media outlets at face value, it’s China, as China reportedly produces more pollution than all of the other countries. Reportedly, China emitted 27% of all greenhouse gases created in 2019.
On the surface, this seems huge, but you actually have to look beneath the hood and see what’s happening. Everyone is kind of blaming China for problems that other countries like America are actually responsible for. The US imports a lot of goods from China, often from US companies that are located in China that produce goods for other countries. In other words, American companies are producing goods outside of America, driving up emissions rates for China.
Pretty much all of these so-called “helping the environment” initiatives by Western countries fall completely flat on their face when you realize that most of them are just outsourcing carbon to other countries, making their own countries look green-friendly by comparison.
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“What We Need Are International Agreements”
When Trump lost to Biden in the 2020 elections, the world breathed a sigh of relief collectively, especially eco-activists who saw this as a chance for America, one of the largest polluters in the world, to finally rejoin the Paris Agreement, an international treaty signed by 197 countries to reduce emissions in an attempt at curbing the oncoming threat of climate change.
This seems like a great idea on the surface, right? Close to 200 countries signed a big agreement that’ll finally pressure them and companies to make the change before we’ll all need underwater real estate. Except that the Paris Agreement, along with other similar agreements, won’t actually change anything.
For starters, a lot of people assume the Paris Agreement makes countries take action, but this is very far from the truth. There are actually zero repercussions for any country breaking their oath or even failing to reduce emissions at all. On top of that, the hastily written document has basically no set requirements or emissions levels that countries collectively need to hit. Countries make their own goals and decide when they’ve hit them, which is a bit like giving yourself a gold medal for doing nothing. Any country can set any goal they want, no matter how blatantly useless it is, then claim that they’ve done their part.
