[FooHentai]

Whenever this point is brought up it’s suspiciously blind to the concept of per-capita emissions.

China and India have enormous populations. Their per-capita emissions are low.

Unless you’re arguing a position that some folks in the world are inherently more deserving of a better quality of their life beyond mere circumstance, it doesn’t make sense to raise the ‘per-nation’ measure of emissions over the per-person measure.

There is greatest scope for emissions reduction in nations where per-capita emissions are highest. American citizens need to be converned primarily about how to reduce America’s emissions. Chinese citizens need to be concerned primarily about how to reduce China’s emissions. Everyone is already best placed to exert political pressure and carry out grassroots change on their respective home turf.

Targets for nations have already been established in inter-governmental negotiations and re-litigating the basic figures in individual citizen discussion is pointless at best, actively distracting at worst.

“First, pluck the beam from your own eye”

[philwelch]

There are also issues of how to account for the same set of carbon emissions.

Suppose a Chinese factory uses electricity supplied by coal to manufacture a product. The product is shipped to the United States aboard a Korean container ship before being shipped by diesel train to Seattle, where it is delivered to a retailer by truck, purchased, plugged into the wall and powered by a combination of hydroelectric and natural gas energy. In this scenario, many of the carbon emissions can be counted as Korean or Chinese even though the end consumer is American.

The flip side of this is that the United States can also directly affect Chinese carbon emissions by simply buying fewer Chinese products.

Edit: Also, since China is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not like Chinese people can pressure their government very much.

[FooHentai]

For sure, and ‘emitter pays’ is difficult to account since monitoring is required and not really feasible.

It works if everyone is honest, but when there’s financial incentive at local and global level to be dishonest, the outcome is predictable.