[mraison]

I assume you're looking at overall CO2 emissions rather than per-capita emissions.

The page you linked shows fossil CO2 emissions per capita:

China: 7.7t CO2/cap/yr

USA: 15.7t CO2/cap/yr

Denver seems like a good place to give a speech.

Of course, country size does matter, but it's unfair to simply compare total emissions when there's such a huge difference in population size.

[Symmetry]

If you're concerned with how guilty each individual consumer in a country should feel look at per capita emissions. If you're interested in stopping climate change effectively look at total emissions.

[Traster]

Well if you're concerned with effectively stopping climate change a quite important part of your calculation is where you can actually persuade people to address the issue. That's a complex calculation, but I think it's far more credible that you can get the policy supported in the US and then enforced internationally through treaties and negotiations with the support of Europe than trying to do a tour persuading China.

[srean]

Not guilt, but compensation not necessarily in cash. And perhaps fairness.

[brosinante]

What if you're just interested in pushing a specific agenta.

[goatinaboat]

It’s certainly notable how she never directs her anger at China or India, but reserves it for Western countries only. She has a very white-centric view of the world.

[yodon]

Multiply the per-capita numbers by the sizes of the country and you see that in terms of total emissions China is the most critical player. Worse, per-capita emissions are strongly correlated with consumer buying power so the more China's economy grows the more it's per-capita and total emissions are likely to grow.

It's important to reduce emissions everywhere, but China is the key player to watch.

[goatinaboat]

I assume you're looking at overall CO2 emissions rather than per-capita emissions.

I’m looking at the page I linked. Per-capita is basically irrelevant, the issue is the total emissions under the control of any one government. Or should China not act until they match the US per-capita but with 3-4x the population?

Further the US and European trends are already downwards. China’s is dramatically upwards.

[hesk]

> Further the US and European trends are already downwards.

US CO2 emission trends are downwards because the US stopped burning coal. In the same time, they've switched to natural gas produced by fracking. Fracking leaks methane. Taking methane and CO2 emissions together, US greenhouse gas trends are stable and not downward.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-literal-gas...

I don't know about EU trends. I'm not very optimistic.

[mraison]

> the issue is the total emissions under the control of any one government

Total emissions definitely matter (no need to give speeches in Palau even if per-capita emissions are much greater than in the USA), but considering this number without regard to the population size is completely unrealistic and insensitive.

For China's overall emissions to get to the same level as the USA, that means a Chinese citizen would be expected, on average, to emit less than half of what a US citizen emits.

Would you expect a Chinese citizen to only eat half of what a US citizen eats, just because there are more people in their country ? Of course not.

China's trend is dramatically upwards because a big chunk of the population is still getting out of poverty. Of course CO2 emissions are increasing.

[goatinaboat]

insensitive

The ecosystem doesn’t actually care whose feelings are hurt, you know. It’s a weird argument to make. China is the single largest emitter of CO2, plastic waste in the oceans, etc etc. Yet we expect them to do nothing about it until 2030 at the earliest, but just stay on their upward trend. Which is about the same time as the ecosystem collapses entirely according to AOC. But we mustn’t be “insensitive” about it!

[kaybe]

Well I suppose they could split their country, that would lower the emissions of the individual parts and might bring them down to the US level easily.

(Not that they'd be interested in that, but still.)