While your statement is fundamentally correct, the issue here is that people typically use these charts as an excuse to point the finger.
The tension globally is between the west who has high per capita emissions, a long period of high emissions, and high living standards as compared to the global south who have a larger population and lower living standards and yet still high absolute levels of emissions.
Telling China/india/et al that they’re the real problem is taken as “yeah we polluted for centuries to get rich but that’s all in the past, you need to stay poor in order to save the planet”.
An alternative solution might be to have the west pay to help these countries develop more sustainably, but that’s met with anger by the rising nationalist elements. I mean even importing green tech from the global leader (China) is being resisted.
absolute amounts of emissions by country is an arbitrary division, more people = more (demand for) industrial activity; for the numbers to be useful and actionable, they need to be understood in the context of the people those emissions are for, no?
At the end of the day, it's one ecosystem we all live it. It doesn't matter if the top polluter has 1 billion, 0.1 billion, or 10 billion people. The total amount of greenhouses gasses added to the atmosphere is too much. We all need to stop adding and then start removing.
As for which metric to use, that depends on the argument you want to make. One can look at cumulative emissions and see how western nations have polluted much more historically, and should therefore do much more to clean up a mess their have contributed much more to.
Their governments will retort: "Oh but we produce so little of current global emissions now, those other countries polluting more should change first".
> It doesn't matter if the top polluter has 1 billion, 0.1 billion, or 10 billion people
Each polluter is an individual person making individual decisions.
The thing people are dancing around is any concept of "rationing", because that's political suicide, but at the same time asking people who've only just got clean water and walk to work to reduce emissions while other people are taking multiple transatlantic flights per week looks a bit questionable.
But why are countries the best division? Why not continents, or unions of countries (e.g. EU or USA), or sub-country divisions like states, or even smaller regions? Countries don't have the highest possible impact on all people, that would probably be unions. It's also not the most direct impact, that would depend on each country, but for e.g. Germany that would be the individual states.
The per-capita measurement allows you to directly and meaningfully compare any subdivision, while per-country isn't even meaningfully comparable with other per-country measurements.
> The per-capita measurement allows you to directly and meaningfully compare any subdivision, while per-country isn't even meaningfully comparable with other per-country measurements.
Compare to what end? The environment cares about total output, not per capita output.
> while per-country isn't even meaningfully comparable with other per-country measurements.
> Compare to what end? The environment cares about total output, not per capita output.
Yes, and the environment does not care in any way about countries or other silly subdivisions. So we approach the problem as each of us humans having some carbon budget based on the limits of our environment. You can argue how exactly these budgets are distributed, but it's the only measure that matters. Because again: you're arbitrarily choosing to look at countries, when even other subdivisions along the same axis would make more sense. So why focus on countries specifically?
> Why does it need to be?
Because obviously a measurement that's comparable is more useful than one that isn't. It allows us to make determinations about what changes bring us closer to the goal of environmental sustainability, and which changes bring us further away. Do I really need to go on further?
Doesn’t that assume that the production isn’t for export. For instance, if the EU and US export their industries to low wage, high population countries you would see their per capita numbers drop and overall leveling out. However, the damage to the climate would be equal. Essentially, you need to look at a lot of factors and think holistically about the problem.