alt Hacker News> COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.
We live in a horrendously inefficient way. We ship everything from half way around the world in diesel ships, trucks, and trains, we buy shitty single-use plastic items packaged and shipped in single-use plastic packaging, we replace our phones instead of our batteries, our clothing and shoes degrade within a couple years, our restaurants and grocery stores throw away half the food they purchase, our agricultural system spends nitrogen and pesticides like they're free to grow corn as an industrial chemical component. I don't know exactly how much meat there is on that bone, but there's a whole lot of emissions we could remove that wouldn't negatively impact our lives and would probably improve them.
Forget how we live. Take the per capita CO2 output of Norway—which already generates 99% of its electricity using renewables—and somehow halve it. If the Indian subcontinent increases to that level, the added CO2 output alone will be double that of the entire EU currently.
And that’s the steady-state number. It’s impossible to believe that these countries can become twice as efficient as Norway, which already has a fully renewable grid, while building a ton of housing and infrastructure that Norway doesn’t have to build because it’s already built.