So America's done enough? With our lavish lifestyles, large suburban homes, one or more cars per household, eating out all the time, running the heater or AC half the year, unparalleled rates of consumption?

All of that and yet we are supposed to be comfortable telling people in China one generation removed from levels of poverty Westerners could not even fathom: "no, no cheap electricity for you! You're the ones who need to sacrifice!"

Some people are interested in carbon-accounting, others are interested in moral-accounting. What the moral accounters may not realize is that their accounting is rarely useful for solving problems, and is often actively harmful. The first step to making progress in many areas is to say "OK, let's forget about trying to find someone to blame".

Wrong. Carbon accounting suggests it's easier to make cuts in the people who are using the most as they have far more fat to trim and you can get dramatically greater reductions in environmental damage with much smaller impact to overall. standard of living

This is both the moral and practical solution, it's just not what people want to hear.

No it doesn't. The problem is that there aren't enough "people who are using the most" to make any substantial difference. This is the same flaw in the argument that we should fix inequality in America by just taking 90% of the billionaires' money: we'd run out of billionaires after only paying a few months' rent for everyone.

Well, good luck with that.

> The climate doesn’t care about per capita though

The climate doesn't care for borders and sovereignty either. "China" is just an arbitrary set of people and businesses- you could as well calculate the emissions of the US + Europe + Middle East, or that of companies with a name starting by a letter from a to k, or that of bald people.

If you want to talk about responsibility, instead, then you need to take in account population, and there the US are much worse offenders.

Sure, we can divide people up into groups in any random way.

But there's nothing fair about requiring people or groups to equalize their emissions, in general.

If you drive a semi tractor trailer, and I drive a car, then we both may need to reduce our CO2 emissions, but equalizing them makes no sense if you in fact need to transport a lot more stuff than me. The whole reason you drive a truck that gets lousy mileage is because it's more efficient per pound of goods transported than if they were loaded into passenger cars.

If we want to reduce global CO2 emissions, then the only rational and reasonable way to do it is to treat every kg of CO2 equally, and not get sidetracked into other notions of fairness.

I'm aware that carbon taxes, cap and trade, etc. may have a lot of problems, it's just that the practical problems of doing the right thing don't change what the right thing is.

Like the saying about looking for your keys under the streetlight when they aren't there.

The Chinese government is responsible for pollution that comes out of China. There's no entity responsible for pollution from names starting with a to k, or from bald people.

Ok, so let's blame China for being the largest emitter of co2. Then the problem would be solved by splitting China equally in two new countries, ChinaA and ChinaB, each with exactly half of the current population and factories and everything else unchanged. The emissions of each half would now be less than the emissions if the US, would you start blaming the US now for being the biggest emitter? Note that absolutely nothing would have changed in terms of pollution.

It would make more sense to blame China for having such a high population density- four times that of the US. However, reducing the population is a pretty harsh demand, and in fairness China has already taken tough measures in this respect with the one child policy.

> splitting China equally in two new countries, ChinaA and ChinaB, each with exactly half of the current population and factories and everything else unchanged. The emissions of each half would now be less than the emissions if the US

Check your math again: this isn't true. Per the article we're discussing, China is responsible for 27% of emissions and the US for 11%. Half of China's emissions is more than all of the US's emissions.

> Check your math again: this isn't true

I used data from 2018, which I understand can be outdated now. But then you can split China in four parts, the argument doesn't change. If the problem is the total amount emitted by any political division of people, then splitting it in multiple parts should solve the problem. It doesn't.

But the reason China gets away with as much as it does is that it's so big and powerful. If there were four mini-Chinas, it would be much easier for the rest of the world to say "we're not buying anything from you until you clean up your emissions."

> If there were four mini-Chinas, it would be much easier...

But why would you? They wouldn't be the worst emitters, after all. The US would be a worse emitter than each of them.

I don't think so. Saudi Arabia has 1/20th the GDP of China, murders a journalist, and the US still has no problem importing oil.

Is it because China manufactures almost everything we buy in the US?

Even if this is the source of the pollution, there's clean and dirty ways to manufacture most things, and China has no qualms about using a dirtier way if it's cheaper.