[tsimionescu]

India is not in even in the top 30 countries that can realistically reduce emissions. They have per capita emissions lower than any European country, except maybe Iceland. Lower than the Nordics, much, much lower than France or Germany or Spain. There's no way for them to reduce their emissions without severely impacting lifestyle even more drastically - which is not at all the case for us here in Europe.

[BoardsOfCanada]

To quantify this, India had a per capita CO2 emission of 2.07 tonnes per year, while Sweden had 3.43 (2023). Sweden used this to achieve a 58,100 USD per capita GDP (2025) compared to India's 2,878 USD all while using a non-unsignificant part of it as heating in the winter. It would be great for all of us if India could do better on a per capita basis since the resulting effect would be huge.

[tsimionescu]

You're forgetting the fact that Sweden (like other European countries) has had >100 years of much higher emissions than India, and has built this wealth through that. Wealth compounds - so if you want to make these sorts of arguments, you should look at total historical emissions per capita.

[hopelite]

So because others made an unknown mistake, now India should be allowed to perpetrate known, deliberate, and intentional harm? It makes India that much worse, it makes India evil!

This is just unsophisticated and uncivilized excuse making and primitive rationalization.

[tsimionescu]

No, the point is that the fair way to look at this is that every country has a total carbon budget, based on population. Since atmospheric CO2 is a cumulative resource, that doesn't really decay at human time scales, looking at current emissions is misleading. It's taking an arbitrary moment in time as a 0 basis and saying "it doesn't matter how we got where we are now, from now on you shouldn't emit more than we do".

The reality is that European countries (including Russia) and the USA are disproportionately responsible for the massive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere today. So, they should be more responsible for fixing this - either by investing some of the wealth they accumulated through this massive energy accumulation (that resulted in the CO2 emission) into carbon capture technologies, or by subsidizing the need for other countries in the world to build energy without so much pollution.

[dzhiurgis]

You are conflating energy vs emissions. Cheap clean energy is propelling India and China to the moon.

[pessimizer]

These arguments are frustratingly stupid. It's as if 100 royals were eating a quarter of the food, 10,000 peasants were eating the other three-quarters, and the royals were telling the peasants that their greed was causing the stores to run dangerously low.

[BoardsOfCanada]

I gave you the numbers, if you want an honest argument then use the numbers. It's as if 10.5M "royals needing heat" used 3.6 MT (0.12%) while 1450M "peasants" used 3000 MT (99.88%).

[legulere]

Why not? India could easily leapfrog fossil fuels, and replacing coal with renewables would even have a positive impact.

[hopelite]

India started around 40 new coal power plants just in 2024.

Per capita is irrelevant in this matter. The presumed impacts on the environment and the planet do not care that India has long had an unsustainable, reckless population size. Per capita use in situations like this is simply ridiculous and evasive lying.

[pessimizer]

> Per capita is irrelevant in this matter.

Sounds like something a country with extremely high per capita emissions would say. Somebody else would say that the imaginary line drawn around a bunch of land and given a name matters a hell of a lot less.

I actually don't worry about emissions at all because I compare my personal emissions to the emissions of the entire continent of Asia. It's not my fault that the inhabitants decided to be more than one person.

[hopelite]

What did you not understand about “per capita is irrelevant”. You make my very point and don’t even realize it though. It is an incomplete measure and a bell curve distribution relative to productivity, especially when talking about one civilization that produced all the advances and one that not only uses all those advances, but has not contributed any advances.

If you want to use per capita, you need to look at the qualities, make a qualitative determination; per capita net value, per capita quality score, etc.

Or maybe you would suggest that Europeans should start having 20+ children per woman and that will then magically improve things because their per capita measure by moronic means will improve immensely?

So get to it, Europe, have 20, 30, 40+ children per woman, because low intelligence people will then celebrate how wonderful you’ve improved your nonsense, meaningless pollution numbers.

[tsimionescu]

Every human on earth has the same right to use the planet's resources as every other human - so per capita emissions make natural sense.

Countries are just arbitrary collections of people, so looking at per-country emissions is actually entirely arbitrary. Would you say that the USA should emit no more than the Vatican?

[cuteboy19]

india and china should just split into 30 countries respectively (for tax purposes)

it would put all these arguments to rest

[1over137]

If they can’t reduce per capita, they could reduce population: free birth control, etc etc.

[tsimionescu]

The same argument can be made for us here in Europe. And it makes even more sense, since we're trying to live in this extremely northerly place, where large amounts of energy are required yearly to even make it habitable, and solar is quite inefficient.