[makotech221]

cool now compare the population difference.

In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.

[passwordoops]

So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?

[tzs]

No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.

More details are in this comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42229636

[ivewonyoung]

Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?

[graemep]

Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).

[tsimionescu]

The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.

[graemep]

> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.

It was providing a lot of raw materials.