EU here... Housing in the city is so expensive that minorities can't find a home there. Hope that helps.
So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.
I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.
The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.
It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet
Which is to be commended, but also... The US started from one of the worst positions too. The the absolute worst, but certainly the worst of all the major economies.
If they were cheating by any significant amount, we would know because emissions are visible from space. This article has an image showing how emissions can be traced to individual sources, even: https://theconversation.com/tr...
Satellites can also see reduced smog over China.
We can also see the massive solar and wind installations from space, or you can just get a visa and go look at them for yourself. Plenty of people have. Take a PM2.5 and CO2 monitor with you, for good measure.
Is there any area of science where we are ahead of China? Certainly not satellites.
Obviously exponential growth won't go on forever, but we are a very, very, very long way from saturating the available demand or land available for renewables.
Deployment will keep accelerating as costs continue to fall and people see the benefits of producing their own energy. The payback time on the investment has been steadily falling for decades.
Is it that different to what some Western countries have? The US is a two party system. The UK is too, despite recent gains by smaller parties.
Speaking for the UK, the choice is between hard and soft Thatcherism. That's not much of a choice. A vote for anyone else is usually wasted, not counted at the national level.
That is deliberate policy too. No government will change it because they think they can win the next election and gain 100% of the power, rather than a more representative system that distributes it in a democratic way.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. -- George Wald