[bnolsen]

Having now been in China for several weeks this beating the drum trying to make americans feel guilty (and give power over to other people) is absolutely absurd. You want to control pollution the first places to start are china and india. The US in comparison produces negligible impact.

[torpfactory]

That is simply not true. The US may not produce as much visible pollution anymore, but we still emit a ton of carbon. Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are all about as much or more than us but China is significantly less per capita.

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

[TaylorAlexander]

It’s my understanding that America has contributed to the majority of total emissions since fossil fuel use began. I’ve heard that recently China has eclipsed us in annual emissions, but we still emit a lot of CO2 (and probably the most per capita). We have the power to develop new technologies and were the ones who benefitted from the majority of historical carbon emissions. With that information it seems to me justified to push Americans to act on climate change.

[bayareanative]

Tax carbon severely and plow collections into massive-scale CCS and SRM. It won't happen until the horse has long since left the barn.

[umanwizard]

Nonsense. The US produces more than double the CO2 per capita as China.

As usual, total numbers are meaningless without scaling them by population. If China split into 100 independent states tomorrow, they wouldn't be a problem anymore by your metric, even if they produce exactly the same amount of CO2 as they do now.

Fair comparison with roughly equal population: Europe, the US, and Australia combined vs. China. And the former group produces more CO2 than the latter.

[sparky_z]

Surely, as far as the planet's concerned, the total numbers matter more than per capita. If, say, Andorra hypothetically had the largest per-capita numbers by an order of magnitude, that still wouldn't make them the biggest threat to the planet, nor would it Andorra the most effective place to target activism.

Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down, while the China's and India's are going up with no signs of slowing. So is their population growth. The US is currently "taking care of itself" more or less, but China and India (already # 1 and #3 in total carbon numbers) are getting worse at a frightening pace. If we spend all of our energy focusing on the US, even if we're extraordinarily successful there, we'll look around in 20 years and see we lost progress globally. As though we didn't heed Amdahl's law and spent all of our time optimizing the wrong function. The most important thing we can do is find some way for China and (especially) India to grow their economies and pull their citizens out of poverty in a way that doesn't destroy the planet.

[umanwizard]

It would make Andorra and countries similar to Andorra the most effective place to target activism, assuming the total population of those countries was large enough to be meaningful.

According to Wikipedia, there are 41 countries with more emissions per capita than China, including some with large populations like the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Russia...

Really, my point is that it's wrong to think in terms of "countries" because country boundaries are arbitrary. Like, if there were one small town with 1000x the per capita emissions as the US, it wouldn't matter. What matters is the number of people multiplied by the amount they emit.

[sparky_z]

I edited in a 2nd paragraph about trendlines while you were responding, sorry about that.

Country boundaries aren't arbitrary because they are where policies are made. If you could just pick the top 1-billion polluting individual humans in the world and focus on them, that would be ideal. But that obviously doesn't work. You have to operate on the level of political groups. Nation states are the most obvious groups because they can respond to geopolitical pressures.

[reallydude]

> it's wrong to think in terms of "countries" because country boundaries are arbitrary

Policies and social behaviors (enforced by nations or voluntary) are not. People cause the pollution we're talking about, so we have to deal with them as they are.

> What matters is the number of people multiplied by the amount they emit.

Pointing to per capita rather than aggregate is a deflection. Either the environment is in practical danger and we need to reduce total aggregate emissions, or we need to do that AND need to mildly reduce emissions through personal responsibility (virtue signaling) leading to "eventual good" by habit forming. Either way the aggregate matters most, per capita least.

I believe that the situation will come down to a trade war before a physical war, which still involves nations and absolute measures. Once those measures are involved, then per capita will become a factor internally (to the nations involved). Convince me otherwise. I will not reply, but I will read/listen. I'm genuinely interested in the train of thought that other people follow.

[robocat]

> Also, if you look at the trendlines, the US's per capita numbers are going down

US is trending up again:

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174082/us-carbon-emissions-20...

[pier25]

Not only it is not negligible, the US produces about triple the world average per capita.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/20...

[rorykoehler]

Adding to what others have stated much of China's pollution comes from producing the endless stream of consumerist crap Americans are uniquely addicted to.

[jordache]

US still accounts for double digit percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions.. so it's not a non-trivial amount

[robocat]

2009 article: Data from 1900 up to 2004 "The US has the biggest historical share (314,772m metric tonnes of carbon dioxide), while European countries such as Germany (73,625) and the UK (55,163) cast a shadow over developing nations such as India (25,054), Brazil (9,136) and Indonesia (6,167). China is on 89,243."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...

And as per article, US companies are also involved in the muddy waters of denialism propoganda.