That's a bad argument. If Americans would emit CO2 at the same per capita rate as china, the world would be much better off.

The fact that the Chinese can emit much less per capita and at the same time have raised their standards of living significantly over the last few decades, all while producing a huge fraction of manufactured goods consumed worldwide goes to show that something is deeply wrong with the US' policy on this subject.

If Americans emitted the same per capita rate as China, they would have a lower standard of living. This shouldn't be the argument anyway. The focus should be on cleaner and more efficient technologies, which includes nuclear.

By that argument China should be releasing more CO2, unless you have a reason why Chinese people shouldn't have the same quality of life as Americans.

Or build more nuclear, solar and wind plants, which they're doing.

First, you said

> If Americans emitted the same per capita rate as China, they would have a lower standard of living.

Then, you said

> Or build more nuclear, solar and wind plants, which they[China]'re doing.

So... the US could reduce their carbon footprint massively by doing the same, while maintaining standards of living? Good to see we are in agreement, and China is not the problem atm.

It really depends on how "standard of living" is measured in the first place. I live in Europe and make top 5% percentile income, live a pretty decent life that doesn't require a car, in a very energy-efficient apartment. In the US I would likely not have that option, would likely be forced to have a car, would have less vacation days, would have to navigate a nightmarishly complicated healthcare system, and survive some school shootings. Yes, I would make more money, potentially live in a bigger house, but it is debatable if that would automatically be a higher living standard.

EDIT: Also worth mentioning: for a huge chunk of Americans, living an European standard of living would be a huge improvement.

> This shouldn't be the argument anyway.

Why not? The reverse sounds more insightful:

If the rest of the world adopts and American standard of life, emissions would be much higher.

Should we expect the world to adopt a sub-US standard of living forever, or should we address the impacts of our standard of living?

If the rest of world adopts the American standard of life, that means technology continues to progress, and there's a lot more highly educated people innovating. Given that sustainability and climate change are serious concerns now, I don't agree that it will continue to be a bad thing.

Right, because the thing that is missing that will enable everyone to innovate is being able to drive a 3 ton monstrosity to the nearest (~4 miles) drive thru Starbucks.

This assumes a novel technological solution exists at all, which today is unfortunately still a big unknown. I'm hopeful too, but I'm not sure we can afford to make that our plan.

Thinking about it, another assumption implicit in both of our positions is that emissions and standard of living are directly related. I bet we could address this is other ways. I have restaurants and bars about a mile from where I live, if I could get there without crossing multiple four lane roads I'd drive a lot less and be a lot healthier.

Maybe our technological solutions already exist...

It it's not per capita that counts, but per country, then each American should be allowed to pollute 4 times as much as each Chinese person because there are less of them?

I guess as a Brit, I should be allowed to pollute 5 times more than an American?

The climate doesn't care about countries either, and people in developed countries aren't going to lower their standard of livings to meet some acceptable per capita carbon footprint standard. That's why these kinds of arguments are pointless. Blame China, blame the US, blame the British Empire, what difference does any of that make? Unless you can convince the richer countries to pay fines to the developing ones to help them adapt to climate change.

Possibly you (well, some international body) can do that. Leaving that idea aside, countries matter because countries are controlled by policies, per-country.

This doesn't, of course, mean that you get to burn a big bonfire of coal if your country has a small population. The reality is that you get to burn a big bonfire of coal in any country unless it has a law against it. And another part of the reality is that emissions are caused mainly by transport, power generation, industry and construction, all of which can be decarbonised by policy, so the personal carbon footprint thing just isn't relevant because it's not up to individuals, and people having orgiastic fossil fuel bonfires is not the true nature of the problem anyway.

To be fair, the climate doesn't care about countries either.

But we do if we want to achieve global reduction in emissions while eradicating global poverty at the same time.

Per capita emissions in the US are ridiculously high while per capita emissions in poor countries are low and are bound to increase with development. Per capita emissions is the relevant metric to measure and compare the situation across countries with vastly different populations and to possibily forecast trends in overall emissions.

Of course not, but higher per-capita is the easier and more humane thing to target. If you account for the fact a lot of China's output is for the US then the US would be both higher per-capita and probably highest overall too. Yet despite having over 4x the population China has only about 2x the total output. That means the US is vastly inefficient compared to China. It's easier to get gains by improving an inefficient system versus an efficient one. In other words, the US it the low hanging fruit, not China.