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by tzs 2052 days ago
> Which graph to look at depend on what question one has. If the question is "Who is polluting the world and need to stop" then country’s annual CO2 emissions is the single most relevant graph since that is where the pollution is right now coming from.

So if China were to spin off each province as a separate country and the US were to spin of each state as a separate country with each of the new countries emitting exactly as much CO2 as it had before it was a separate country, this would be an improvement?

1 comments

Splitting of countries has as much improvement as getting higher population density. A 5 person household does not have less pollution than 4 person household just because they got one person more to share the blame. Similar two countries combined do as much pollution as if they were separated, because physics does not care about borders.

If we go by per capita, the country that contribute the most to the world pollution is a island country with 300 islands and 1700 people. At the same time there are a bunch of oil countries which list as the most green countries in the world because per capita they got close to nothing in pollution per person. If we go outside of countries, the international space station and antarctic would have insane amount of CO2 per capita since only a very small number of highly specialized people living there.

If we want to stop climate change, going to Palau and Luxembourg with remedies will have zero impact. Their numbers at top of the table is only relevant in terms of statistics.