[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.