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What I'm observing is that almost nobody - other than perhaps Elon Musk - is thinking clearly about the situation we are in. Allow me to explain. Each dollar in the global economy emits (on average) 260 grams of CO2. If we spent $8000 each per year, we would have sustainability.
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You’re way overindexed on charismatic public figures and media discourses. I know like a dozen people who think about this at a more sophisticated level than this. They are invisible in public and it doesn’t matter because the levers they’re working to push are all backend.
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That's new. Maybe you have a *very* unusual network. Even in the think tanks etc. I rarely if ever found actual realism about overall consumption: people still thought in terms of reductions from current levels, rather than reasoning from absolutely consumption. Very encouraging
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I do have an unusual network, because I’ve been doing consulting work in sustainability for 4-5 years now, but it’s not *that* unusual. It’s just ignored/missed because it’s heads down working out the boring details on the big leaps.
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So you're saying you regularly see people working from the assumption that they're going to get CO2 per capital down to 2 tons *in America* - that as an explicit design goal? How remarkable! Most people are totally stuck in "reduce by 4%" vs. measuring from an absolute 2T goal.
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No. They’re working on tech options that have that order of magnitude of potential if they actually work out. They are correctly calibrated. The per capita number is useful for scicomm/elections but is not a particularly useful way to approach specific parts of the stack.
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Per capita is a terrible planning measure actually since the vast majority of decarbonization is upstream of last mile consumption. The only thing it does is amp up guilt and frustration and cosmetic bs at loci where individuals lack meaningful agency.
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You’re not going to decarbonize the steel and cement industries by berating the public about per capita shit. You’re not going to get the plastics supply chain off fossil-fuel feedstocks that way. “Emissions exports” to China by France is not meaningfully a per-capita thing.
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I find per capita frames for carbon about as useful as per capita frames for say space stations or tanks. Yes everybody philosophically “owns” 1/8-billionth of the ISS but that’s… not a helpful frame.
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