GeofCox on Nostr: Well, I think you're looking at the date 'through western eyes'. I saw this earlier ...

Well, I think you're looking at the date 'through western eyes'. I saw this earlier when you said: "switch to the table view and you'll see China in second place, between the US and Russia". Not so - because China is much bigger. Adjust for population and you see all the biggest CO2 polluters are in fact the old 'western' countries.

It's true, obviously, that to date development has been associated with fossil fuel use - but there's a huge trap - which I think you're in danger of falling into - of saying the development model the west used is the only one, and the measures of success the west uses are the only ones.

Indeed, if you adopt measures like GDP it does appear that China eradicated 'poverty' mainly by adopting (to some extent - but that's another discussion) a 'western' approach - but that is flawed, as Sullivan & Hickel show here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169 . By the kind of real-life metrics Sullivan & Hickel use, such as longevity, the biggest advances were earlier. In the 1950s, China’s people lived 3 years less than the world average; by 1970s, they lived 5 years longer than the world average.

There's a common view that says 'there's no point taking action on climate-ecological breakdown unless China, India, etc stop development'. This assumes a western-defined idea of what 'development' must be, and that everywhere must go through the same historical processes, such as the fossil fuel stage, that brought us to precisely the current disastrous pass. I don't believe this. Instead we should be holding up the way 'the west' developed - and indeed many aspects of of the way it lives now - precisely as examples of what NOT to do.

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