There's stats about greenhouse gasses that adjust for exports and imports.
This has traditionally made China look slightly better and the countries that buy their exported goods slightly worse.
But if you buy an EV built in China you're investing some carbon and then every mile you drive reducing carbon compared with an ICE equivalent. Solar panels and wind turbines are similar.
I saw someone claim that Chinese green tech exports in 2024 caused a 1% drop in global emissions which is an absolutely wild number and presumably if counted towards China means they are already on the downslope of carbon and not on a plateau as they are if you consider only their territorial emissions.
Or it's like having one of your arms intentionally tied behind your back by a long running conspiracy to place all media in the hands of, at best, faceless corporate bean counters who are amenable at the merest hint of a threat, or worse, active regime loyalists?
This is mostly guesswork but I think you need to get the vaccine before you catch it and lots of people have it as they get older.
If you have a limited supply the greater bang per buck would be to start with the young people who almost certainly haven't caught it yet and then work your way up.
It's less that and more "we just haven't tested it in older populations yet".
Sure you are more likely to have it the older you are but even then you are unlikely to have all the strains. The vaccine covers like 9 or 10 different strains so it can protect you from the other strains even if you already have one of them.
It's generally only when you get into the 60s and up that the justification for not recommending the vaccine changes. Once you get into those later years the immune response changes a bit and you get new concerns.
An example being herpes zoster (chickenpox) where after a certain age you are recommended to get the shingles vaccine instead of the chickenpox vaccine since the way the disease presents and how the body reacts to it changes with age (technically shingles can happen at any age but generally herpes zoster presents as shingles instead of chickenpox the older you get).
> you are recommended to get the shingles vaccine instead of the chickenpox vaccine since the way the disease presents and how the body reacts to it changes with age (technically shingles can happen at any age but generally herpes zoster presents as shingles instead of chickenpox the older you get).
If the underlying virus is the same, what is different between the vaccines? How it presents shouldn't matter as much?
The shingles vaccine is a larger/more aggressive dose than the chickenpox vaccine.
And nowadays chickenpox vaccine uses live attenuated viruses (i.e. modified to be non-infectious but still look the same) whereas the shingles vaccine uses recombinant proteins. This allows the shingles vaccine to deliver the higher viral load that they want for inoculating against shingles without putting a bunch of live viruses into the body.
It's also worth noting that the recombinant vaccine is more effective for shingles compared to the equivalent viral load live vaccine by a significant margin. It's something like 90% reduction in incidence vs 50%.
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> How it presents shouldn't matter as much?
It's not an all or nothing thing but it's a matter of percentages.
And the big reason why they present differently is that chickenpox kind of attacks every part of the body since it's new. It of course does best at infecting the skin and nerves but it mildly affects every part of the body. But then it goes dormant in the nerves because that's where it's most "compatible" and the body is the worst at fighting it.
So then with shingles your body still has the immunity but the reactivated virus is able to out-compete your immunity in the nerves and it wakes up in whatever specific nerve and spreads along that nerve. This is why shingles generally presents in a band on the body. It's spreading along a specific nerve "line" rather than spreading throughout the whole body, blood, and all.
And so the because the infection can't spread broadly throughout your body it ends up concentrated in that location and presumably the higher viral load combined with focusing on the specific proteins rather than the whole virus increases the body's sensitivity to these flair ups, catching them before they can reach momentum. And then that focused immune training sits on top of the body's existing immunity for the initial "whole body" presentation of the virus.
This is similar to the claim that seizing Microsoft's vast profits still wouldn't make up for the even more vast economic damage their monopoly has done to the economy
And it's correct. But the answer isn't a shrug, it's coming up with a plan to ensure that there are no giant rent seeking monoliths distorting the economy and paying off politicians to get a slap on the wrist every time they illegally extend their power.
Yes, the US hegemony got destroyed. But for a brief beautiful moment in time we created a lot of shareholder value for some already rich people invested in fossil fuels.
Developing nations generally leapfrog by adopting the latest generation of developed world tech.
Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.
This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.
Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:
> In the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company, a multinational corporation, was instrumental in the creation of the banana republic phenomenon.[6][7] Together with other American corporations, such as the Cuyamel Fruit Company, and leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the corporations created the political, economic, and social circumstances that led to a coup of the locally elected democratic government that established banana republics in Central American countries such as Honduras and Guatemala;[8] No official apology has ever been done by any banana company or the U.S. with only the C.I.A. backed dictator of Guatemala apologizing in 2011.[9]
This has traditionally made China look slightly better and the countries that buy their exported goods slightly worse.
But if you buy an EV built in China you're investing some carbon and then every mile you drive reducing carbon compared with an ICE equivalent. Solar panels and wind turbines are similar.
I saw someone claim that Chinese green tech exports in 2024 caused a 1% drop in global emissions which is an absolutely wild number and presumably if counted towards China means they are already on the downslope of carbon and not on a plateau as they are if you consider only their territorial emissions.
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