[ajross]

No offense, but what kind of crazy metric is that? "Wealthy people get to pollute more?" "It's OK to ignore emissions until everyone is as wealthy as we are?" I mean, I could spend hours and hours churning out moral hazards based on that analysis.

It would never fly with other subjects: "handgun injuries per taxable income" shows that only the poor get shot, so it's not really as much a problem as you think.

My vague guess is that you're trying to use "GDP" as some kind of proxy for "industrial output", and saying that while the US emits a ton of CO2, that's OK because we actually need to do that to produce all the wonderful thigns we do. Except that's not what GDP means at all, and industrial production stopped being a dominant fraction of that number like a century ago.

Having lots of web developers and Starbucks franchises in our economy doesn't give us a license to pollute.

(Edit: literally minutes after I posted this, there's a WaPo story up saying that the Trump administration is floating the possibility of a carbon tax of some sort. So maybe there's some hope for conservatives after all.)