[PeanutCurry]

That doesn't really address the core of my argument though, which was that poor policy for mitigating explosive population growth led to China and India have such wildly population sizes compared to other nations. To put this in perspective, the world has 7.5 billion people roughly, China and India account for 2.6 billion of that figure. I don't see a hard reason for why other nations should seriously consider per capita emissions a fair metric for designating responsibility when China and India gain such a strong advantage from that metric compared to similarly developed nations. It seems like there's very little reason why any nation besides China and India would consider that economically fair.

I appreciate your point that other nations have also experienced explosive population growth. However, it's hard to find that persuasive when the end result is two countries having over a third of the world's total population. Especially when neither of those countries are ones that you cited as having had their explosive growth before the rest of the world. It's difficult for to see that as something that happens with responsible domestic policy.

[azernik]

Yes it does. You think China having 1/6 of the world's population is just a factor of modern policy? That's probably (estimates are fairly fuzzy) lower than its proportion of the world population in 1600. See e.g. [1] which estimates world population in 1600 in a band centered at 550m, with estimated populations of late-Ming-dynasty China around 160m.

You seem to view the mid-19th to early-20th centuries, when Europe temporarily had about 1/3 of the world's population because it went into its demographic transition so early, as a good baseline. It is not.

The reason I mentioned Europe having gone into its explosive growth so early is that it was so early that it affects your assumptions, such as that Britain "should" have a quarter instead of a twentieth of the population of China.

[1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...