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by test_alpha 1892 days ago
China is by far the largest emitter, dwarfing the next country (USA). China emit about as much as all of "the west" combined and will soon overtake them because they are still increasing and are likely to continue increasing for the next several decades while most of the west, even USA, emissions have been coming down for 15-20 years or more.

What's more, it's carbon intensity of production is bad, manufacturing something in China as opposed to a cleaner and more efficient country increases emissions. So it makes zero sense to give them subsidies that relatively disadvantage cleaner countries, as part of global efforts to reduce carbon.

1 comments

Total emissions of a country is a totally meaningless stat. If you drew a line in the middle of the country and split them in to east and west china, we would have halved the emissions. We could then draw another line and quarter the emissions. Still means nothing. Only emissions per capita matter.
Completely wrong, emission intensity is what matters, particularly when developing policy that includes a manufacturing exporter like China, the idea of giving them any further advantage over cleaner more efficient economies is insanity.

It's the same as emissions per capita. That's actually worse than meaningless it's actively detrimental because rewarding that metric creates all sorts of perverse incentives around increasing population growth and restricting quality of life.

And I didn't bring up total emissions by country, I was replying to someone else who did. Apparently you weren't so concerned about it when it was wrongly claimed that China was the 2nd largest polluter.