Put another way, it's actually quite difficult to measure your own carbon/resource footprint.
What about people who spend money of organic, fair trade goods, etc.? In the end, that money will be spent by others on goods of the traditional economy.
I'm not too sure about the second part, so criticisms are welcome.
The idea that money you spend then gets spent by someone else on consumption and that you caused that is a little too hand-wavy for me. But I do suspect that a lot of the politically-correct consumption is not as great as it seems when you look deeper.
But that's only accurate if all costs (including environmental) are somehow accounted for in market price(s).
That is rarely the case. Apart from the difficulty of assigning $$ values to things like tropical forest cut down, mountain top removed to get copper ore, water used & polluted, or what have you.
Also it doesn't include social costs. If product is cheap but someone's health suffered, or profit helped dictator to reduce press freedom in producing country, is product still cheap?
Too many unknowns & externalities - $$ spent is a poor indicator.
"China is the ONLY country in the world that both has enough resources to make a real difference AND is actually treating the climate emergency like it’s an emergency"
(Still so many posts will likely come and say here how bad China is and how it is all worthless because of them.. just to excuse our non-action).
China has the bigger emission deficit. Therefore China should have the earlier overshoot date.
It doesn't matter how many people live there.
"I turn a blind eye to the consequences of my needs/desires" has never been a valid justification for anything.
Having two completely different point of view expressed almost exactly the same ways brings balance to the discussion and leaves the reader with the decision of who is "right" or "wrong". And hopefully will answer "neither". Which is the ultimate goal.
"Look what you made me do" has never been a valid justification for anything.
I don’t think it follows from that that “the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less“. China has 31 provinces, so if you look at China’s emissions by province, there will be quite a few that are at the level of CO2 emissions of the UK or below it. By your logic, that would mean the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in those provinces to use less.
If so, who has to do something?
> It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
If we can do that, we can cut the UK’s emissions, too.
I also think it’s not about ‘raising’ the world to what the west currently does, but about changing western standards of living. I think there’s substantial room for decreasing CO2 emissions without decreasing well-being (thought experiment: would people be less happy if the airplane hadn’t been invented? If we had run out of oil in 1980?)
You are ignoring the important part of why he divides people into "China" and the "UK". It's not an arbitrary distinction it's the unit with which laws get enacted and have affect. And China can set laws that affect all provinces. If the UK cuts climate change by enacting local laws it'll make the UK worse off, and the rest of world marginally better off. So the smart thing to do from the UK side is not to focus on local laws that reduce carbon footprint but on items that have global reach, such as treaties and technology.
Re: well being, I think it’s a losing argument. Efficiency and better technologies are more likely to happen than mass enlightenment. I think it depends on what you mean by well being. I suspect people are generally happier for the progress that’s been made in reducing extreme poverty globally, which couldn’t have happened without a cheap and efficient portable energy source like oil. If you’re only measuring western upper middle class educated folks, I’ll wager their well being is worse. But I think you can’t separate the two - the lifting of billions out of extreme poverty and the enshittification of middle class life in the west. But whether you can or not, oil bootstrapped us to this point. But I think we’re demonstrably past bootstrapping and we absolutely must do something different.
In the UK, our own country overshoot per capita is still a good bit above the world average.
Also worth considering historical emissions (and on top of that, the benefits that have came from the work outcome from them leading us til the present situation). As much as emerging countries can 'blame' industrialised countries, surely worth noting that our current technological mitigations are also based on those past emissions.