> So are you saying the assertion that rich countries spend far more CO2 per capita than poorer countries is incorrect?

I made no statement one way or the other, _and neither did OP's study_. I'm just pointing out that the linked paper is bogus.

FWIW, your statement is factually correct - rich countries pollute more per capita than poor countries. I think a more useful metric is emissions per dollar GDP[1]. This measure how carbon efficient an economy is.

We could drop carbon emissions to nearly zero by reverting all of human society to be hunter-gatherers who haven't discovered fire yet. Building a more efficient economy lets us get closer to zero emissions without losing all of our modern quality of life improvements.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...

I agree to an extent. But I don’t think carbon-per-dollar captures the full picture. You speak of quality of life improvements but the economy is largely measured in consumption not quality of life. If maximizing quality of life per unit of carbon is your goal it presupposes that all economic productivity/consumption contributes equally to quality of life. I think there’s an argument that the hedonic treadmill makes this an incorrect assumption

I agree. GDP is not a great measure of quality of life. I also don't think its controversial to say I would be less happy if I lived in a place without electricity, plumbing, or internet. GDP is a first degree approximation of those kinds of quality of life goods.

I only meant to say that the reason poor countries have a low per-capita emissions is because they are very poor. It is not a very instructive or useful metric to look at. Per GDP emissions lets us look at a "lifestyle adjusted" carbon emissions. There are countries in all four quadrants of the poor v rich, efficient v inefficient graph. That gives us a lot more insight into how to structure an economy.

My point (and where we may disagree) is that GDP is only informative to a point. As you point out, that point may be when certain essentials are met such as access to healthcare, clean water, and electricity. Beyond that point GDP as a maximization function may be counterproductive and only measuring marginal utility decreasing marginal utility per unit of carbon increase. Choosing the right metric matters - choosing GDP is at best a clunky approximation once a certain level of industrialization is achieved. After that, there are probably better metrics to measure quality of life. So if we’re trying to maximize quality of life, we should probably focus on those rather than a twisted economist view that productivity is the best measure of a society.