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I don't remember seeing or hearing anybody claim that China's reduction of CO2 emissions is due to Thunberg, and I think that she herself would be the first to call the idea absurd.
I assume you are talking about theprestige's strawman. If you are not, let us see the quotations from them saying that China's actual transition to renewables is due to Greta Thunberg. Not even in Denmark, Sweden's neighbor, have I seen anybody claim that Denmark going wind and solar is happening because of her.
Ah, yes! The MAGA greenwashing of the USA!
Let's take a look at the per-capita CO2 emissions of the USA, Canada, China, the EU and the UK: Per capita CO₂ emissions(Our World in Data)
Notice that the EU has lowered the per-capita CO2 emissions to a level that is far below the USA in the year 1900!
And China has increased its per-capita emissions considerably since the year 2000 - but is nevertheless still far below the USA and Canada.
Unfortunately, Our World in Data's chart only goes to 2023, so it doesn't include this:
Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time (CarbonBrief, May 15, 2025)
For the first time, the growth in China’s clean power generation has caused the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to fall despite rapid power demand growth.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that China’s emissions were down 1.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 and by 1% in the latest 12 months.
Electricity supply from new wind, solar and nuclear capacity was enough to cut coal-power output even as demand surged, whereas previous falls were due to weak growth.
The analysis, based on official figures and commercial data, shows that China’s CO2 emissions have now been stable, or falling, for more than a year.
However, they remain only 1% below the latest peak, implying that any short-term jump could cause China’s CO2 emissions to rise to a new record.
Other key findings include:
Growth in clean power generation has now overtaken the current and long-term average growth in electricity demand, pushing down fossil fuel use.
Power-sector emissions fell 2% year-on-year in the 12 months to March 2025.
If this pattern is sustained, then it would herald a peak and sustained decline in China’s power-sector emissions.
The trade “war” initiated by US president Donald Trump has prompted renewed efforts to shift China’s economy towards domestic consumption, rather than exports.
A new pricing policy for renewables has caused a rush to install before it takes effect.
There is a growing gap that would need to be bridged if China is to meet the 2030 emissions targets it pledged under the Paris Agreement.
I hope that this will shut up the MAGA morons on X who keep whining about China being the #1 CO2 emitter - when they aren't busy denying anthropogenic global warming or claiming that CO2 emissions help make the world greener!
They whine even more when I post this from Our World in Data: Per capita CO₂ emissions
They always insist that it's unfair to look at CO2 emissions per capita.
Yes, China's per-capita CO2 emissions have been on the rise, but unlike the USA it has invested heavily in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables while it was happening. And what has the USA been doing? Drill, baby, drill!And it will probably only get worse.
She tried mentioning China, but the CCP fat shamed her. China is a developing nation and therefore outside the realm of western climate activism/justice.
She did go after Brazil, a developing country, but they had a right wing government so fair game I suppose. Are Brazilians of Portuguese descent brown people? Are they colonizing Europeans when they're actually in Brazil but become a brown oppressed minority when they enter a developed nation? Sometimes it's hard to keep this social justice stuff straight.
I don't know exactly who exactly "they" are and what exactly it is they say. You can't be talking about this, can you?!
I assume you are talking about theprestige's strawman. If you are not, let us see the quotations from them saying that China's actual transition to renewables is due to Greta Thunberg. Not even in Denmark, Sweden's neighbor, have I seen anybody claim that Denmark going wind and solar is happening because of her.
Not a strawman. An observation. You'll see the behavior all across this thread. Point out that Greta failed to inspire the drastic changes she called for, and people promptly change the subject to much smaller, more gradual changes as if that's what she wanted and that's what she inspired.
IIRC, you did exactly such a subject change yourself, with China as one of your examples.
Hopefully this means you agree that Greta did not accomplish the goal she set out to accomplish.
You know, when someone keeps repeating the words of a misogynistic far-right shock jock bigot, they start to sound like they're a misogynistic far-right shock jock bigot too.
The country that invented “flight shaming”, a concept championed by climate activist Greta Thunberg, has scrapped its air tax in a bid to boost its ailing economy.
Sweden invented ‘flight shaming’. Now it is begging airlines to return (TheTelegraph/Yahoo, July 5, 2025)) The pandemic was the catalyst for change. The country suffered a recession in 2023 and the economy shrank by 0.3pc between April and July 2024. It was within this economic climate that the new right-wing government, elected in 2022, said that there were “few reasons to feel flight shame” as they announced plans to invest £76m into the aviation sector and drop the air tax entirely.
It's true! In spite of Sweden's let-the-virus-rip-and-give-us-herd-immunity-by-infection strategy, which was supposed to give Sweden an economic advantage over countries that tried to protect their populations, the radical libertarianism of Swedish pandemic politics didn't result in economic prosperity, so now the country is begging airlines to return. I mean, they gotta do something to try to overcome the obstacle to productivity caused by the worsening health of its working population - not to mention the expenditure on insulin for the increasing number of (not least pediatric) diabetics. The number of dead seniors wasn't enough to make up for it.
However, at this point many well-educated Swedes and Swedish seniors in particular are well aware that getting on an airplane constitutes a considerable risk of infection, so the appeal to airlines probably won't have much effect - with or without Greta Thunberg. It doesn't help that Swedish libertarians are still up in arms against face masks (or even worse: proper respirators), so anybody wearing one at an airport can expect to be exposed to harassment. If you are unwilling to get infected and spread the virus, you are disobeying the recommendations of Sweden's state epidemiologists and are not a true Swedish patriot!
Sweden's right-wing government may have abolished flight shame, but mask shame is still very much in vogue!
Its not a fine line between living in fear of near everything (my wife) and devil may care, damn the torpedoes thinking. It's a huge, wide grey area with many different issues to consider in there.
I am definitely somewhere in the middle on both masks and the climate concerns. I have to be to live in reality and all that.
No little cardboard sign while standing in my parents home is going to save me. I need to get out and do real things with what is in my reach.
Its not a fine line between living in fear of near everything (my wife) and devil may care, damn the torpedoes thinking. It's a huge, wide grey area with many different issues to consider in there.
I am definitely somewhere in the middle on both masks and the climate concerns. I have to be to live in reality and all that.
No little cardboard sign while standing in my parents home is going to save me. I need to get out and do real things with what is in my reach.
I think you may be the only one here who fears your wife. I doubt that any other ISFers know or fear her.
As for masks, being in the middle of them is not how they work. You need only one, and it should cover your mouth and nose.
I don't understand who is supposed be be standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign. You can't be thinking of Greta Thunberg because that's not where she's usually seen carrying cardboard signs. She gets out a lot.
If your wife is the one with the cardboard sign, I can see why you fear her. Unless she can come up with a very good reason for standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign, you should consider having her committed.
I don't understand who is supposed be be standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign. You can't be thinking of Greta Thunberg because that's not where she's usually seen carrying cardboard signs. She gets out a lot.
If your wife is the one with the cardboard sign, I can see why you fear her. Unless she can come up with a very good reason for standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign, you should consider having her committed.
You didn't notice the image in the previous post of a girl standing in her parents' home holding a cardboard sign? Maybe you have that poster on ignore. It's post #312; check and see.
You didn't notice the image in the previous post of a girl standing in her parents' home holding a cardboard sign? Maybe you have that poster on ignore. It's post #312; check and see.
You didn't notice the image in the previous post of a girl standing in her parents' home holding a cardboard sign? Maybe you have that poster on ignore. It's post #312; check and see.
What I noticed was a girl called Greta Thunberg holding a cardboard sign standing in what appears to be a train compartment or maybe the bathroom of a cheap hostel. You guys didn't notice the strange contraption on the wall of ... wherever that is? You didn't notice the folded towel and her hoodie (?) hanging on the wall? A somewhat strange arrangement if at her parents' home.
For some reason you jumped to the conclusion that since she used to live at her parents' house - I have no idea if she still does - it was a photo of "a girl" at her parents' house even though she would probably not wear a mask at home since she wore masks/respirators (fairly good ones, not surgical masks) when she was in public, even outdoors, so it wouldn't have been necessary for her to wear one at home to protect her parents.
Yes, Greg, I am also pretty sure that's what he was trying to say.
I replied to a stupid post with my own deliberately stupid answer. 8enotto's wife is as irrelevant in this thread as her phobias, whether real or imaginary.
First, you guys appear to be incapable of reading a whole article, which you consider to be a gotcha,the one from The Telegraph about 'flight shame' in Sweden.
If any of you had read the article, you would have known that it mentioned "the economic climate" in Sweden caused by the impact of the pandemic and thus implied Sweden's disastrous pandemic strategy, which the article doesn't really go into, for obvious reasons.
However, much like applecorped when he started the thread called Sweden's liberal pandemic strategy questioned as Stockholm death toll mounts, thinking that it was an article that he could use to 'stick it to the libs' - after all, it did say that Sweden's disastrous pandemic strategy was liberal, didn't it?! - you guys were now all over an article, which appeared to 'stick it to ... the "girl"'!
But instead, it turned out to be an article about Sweden's miserable economy and a right-wing government desperately trying to cope with the economic backlash of the country's disastrous handling of the pandemic, a policy that the right-wingers approved of even though it was the work of a Social Democratic government. You would have known if you had read the article!
If you had read the article, you would also have known that the headline and the part about Sweden was only the introduction, and that shame has very little to do with people choosing traveling by train instead of by plane. It is about reducing air travel by means of taxation, and attempts to accomplish this have also been made in other European countries. The article has more about this:
Denmark is the latest to join the party. As of January 1 this year, passengers have had to pay 50DK (£5.73) for intra-European flights, 310DK (£35.83) for medium-haul and DK410 (£47.55) for long-haul flights. Ryanair was quick out of the blocks to criticise the tax. The Irish airline publicly described it as a “discriminatory, fake eco-tax”, criticising Denmark for penalising short-haul passengers while not taxing transfer passengers travelling far greater distances. The airline has scrapped its services from Billund and Aalborg, in response.
I haven't heard shame or Thunberg mentioned in that context, so what is the point? The point is that Denmark is trying to reduce CO2
emissions. One way of doing this is by making it more attractive to go by train and less attractive to go by air.
There are other ways of doing it:
Other countries are clamping down on short-haul aviation through other means. In 2023, France passed a law banning domestic flights on routes where the journey could be made by rail in less than 2hr 30m. (...) Spain is considering mirroring the policy, banning flights where you can make the same journey in 2hr 30m. This would rule out 11 domestic air routes, reducing the country’s domestic aviation emissions by an estimated 10 per cent.
Which is obviously too little (so is the tax) but still a step in the right direction.
“Until electric planes and emissions-free aviation are viable options, we all need to fly less,” says Justin Francis. “Aviation fuel needs to be taxed in line with other transport fuels. The industry has had a free pass here for too long, and the proceeds need to be ring fenced for investment in lower-carbon aviation and improving rail infrastructure.”
This is a hard concept to grasp for friends of CO2 emissions, and it makes it even harder to grasp if they continue to read nothing but headlines.
Much the same way that they don't even look properly at the photo of Greta Thunberg and thus immediately believe it when 8enotto says that it's a photo from her parents' house. It was indoors, and 8enotto said that it was her parents' house, so that's what they went with.
Grow the **** up!
1% ‘super emitters’ responsible for over 50% of aviation emissions (TransportEnvironment.org, Dec 3, 2020)
Just 1% of the world’s population accounts for more than half of the CO2 emissions from passenger air travel, according to a new study. The lead researcher says flying is ‘an elite activity’ in which very rich participants are given a $100 billion subsidy through not paying for the 1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions they cause.
I think you may be the only one here who fears your wife. I doubt that any other ISFers know or fear her.
As for masks, being in the middle of them is not how they work. You need only one, and it should cover your mouth and nose.
I don't understand who is supposed be be standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign. You can't be thinking of Greta Thunberg because that's not where she's usually seen carrying cardboard signs. She gets out a lot.
If your wife is the one with the cardboard sign, I can see why you fear her. Unless she can come up with a very good reason for standing in your parents' home with a cardboard sign, you should consider having her committed.
I just want to be clear about the mask thing. In the screenshot of the YouTube video you linked, nobody is wearing a mask - Including Greta. Nor are they practicing social distancing. Would you say they are expressing the right attitude about the risk of Covid contagion and spread?
Also, are you saying that you personally don a mask whenever you leave the home, or enter some other space, out of caution about Covid?
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