Climate change isn't driven by human defined borders either. It's driven by total CO2 emissions. If a per-capita rate is non sensical then border based emissions are even more non sensical. Greenland only emits 0.001% of the total. Greenland is 12000x a better country than the US wow. This is exactly why per-capita is used.
Yeah and this is clearest when you consider federations. Imagine if you count the US as 50 separate countries, suddenly they are much more climate friendly! That's of course absurd.
And no policy is gonna willingly reduce energy consumption which is directly co-related with QOL when other countries have much higher per-capita consumption. Politically humans need fairness.
But the reason emissions happen is for per-inhabitant benefits. It's a very reasonable idea [0] to set a per-inhabitant goal and criticize countries exceeding that threshold (which the US would still fail at, but I'm arguing against the metric itself rather than US faults).
Take your position to something of an extreme -- the Vatican could open up 200 coal power plants for its holy Bitcoin operations and still be sufficiently less impactful to CO2 than the US that nobody would target them during climate talks. Rephrased from the other direction, each US citizen would blow their CO2 budget by buying a shirt per decade to get down to the Vatican's levels.
That's a common mental failure mode, analogous to the sorites paradox. Countries are made up of many small actors and decisions, and pretending otherwise is unlikely to help you achieve your goals.
[0] Mostly -- transitive effects like one country generating all the goods another country uses are harder to account for. Assuming we could measure perfectly though...
In context of the United States, there are a small number of actors that stand to lose billions to renewables.
I live in the Northeast. Solar reduced my grid demand by 40%. That translates to a full recoup of the investment in 60-65 months with subsidy, 100-110 without. The unsubsidized payback period is 1/3 of the projected useful life of the panels.
You know it’s a good idea because opponents big argument is safety of rooftop installers and future workers disposing of solar panels, topics that these folks DNGAF about in the least.
Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
Europe has a relatively high carbon footprint per unit of output for things like animal husbandry compared to the US, they just don't do enough of it for it to add up.
>Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
This also works in reverse, eg. US importing goods from china and therefore not being on the hook for emissions generated by those goods. ourworldindata has another page that compares the difference between consumption based emissions and territorial emissions[1]. Looking at that page, consumption based emissions are 11% higher for the US vs 27% for the EU. That makes the US look better, but it's not enough to cancel out the fact that the US is 63% more carbon intensive than the EU.
You're kinda contradicting yourself. You're right that it's about absolute numbers. But then you use a percentage.
perhaps 12% for 5% of the global population is too high. But you dont want to relate it to population. Relating to number of countries is rather non-sensical. Some are big (by productivity, area, population, etc.), some are tiny.
Making it relative to countries is useful because that is the delination along which policy is made.
Making it relative to people, IMO, only serves to obscure the fact that the US/China/etc are by far the biggest producers of emissions.
Writing climate policy with them in mind makes more sense than pushing for somewhere like Monaco to reduce emissions, even if their emissions per person are high.
How is that fair when a lot of industrial production was shifted to one region of the globe specifically? It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
>It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
>Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
No, it's pretty straightforward. Count where a given good is consumed rather then where it's produced. It has to be estimated, but that's also the case for territorial emissions or other economic figures like GDP, but we don't throw our hands up and say "well it's too hard and too prone to fudging so we might as well not bother".
>Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
What "feedback loops" are you talking about?
>That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
Ok but surely you must recognize that the US, where the average person drives a pickup/SUV to work is emitting more carbon than something like India where the average person gets around by walking or using motorbikes? That's the concept that conversations like "US emits more carbon per capita" are trying to capture. "The systems are global" sounds like an excuse to continue driving a F-150 to work because of some spurious arguments about how hard it's do to do carbon accounting 100% accurately.
A good thing from whose perspective? From the perspective of US it would always be a bad thing. Why would you ever want to concede something and limit yourself without proportional concessions.
Soft power isn't a thing. As people have recently pointed out with the USAID situation: helping someone and then stopping the help is far worse than not helping at all. Therefore, soft power isn't power, it's actually more like soft debt. Every time you do charity, you add on to your moral obligations. The less charity you do, the fewer the requirements on you.
Certainly, and in fact no soft power operation can be distinguished from something like this (because a front would deliberately be disguised as a soft-power operation) which renders soft-power operations useless to develop soft-power. And when it is removed, one can either reasonably conclude that the underlying operation is no longer necessary or one could react with how it's worse that they took away something they promised.
In no case will anyone ever say "Well, I am not happy it is gone but I am grateful for all the work they put in to help out of a desire to be good guys" so soft power isn't a thing.
To be clear, I have no quarrel with you on the belief that they're fronts. I only mean that they do not develop power of any sort.
Super weird that they don't factor in productivity at all. Don't take me the wrong way I hate the fact that the United States thinks the only way to do anything is to burn fossil fuels, but that doesn't change the fact that our output per capita has got to be 10x the countries we are being compared against in this article.
That perspective also helps to understand the position that any call for radical climate action must be a weaponization of competing economies to weaken the leader of the pack. So it is very bad framing. Do the work cheaper, better, and at scale. By doing it more efficiently you win. Oh, and of course you'll be more innovative too.
In some cases, I’d argue it might ironically be a worse metric. Case in point, a large AI adjacent firm like NVIDIA - or even OpenAI - that is both “creating gdp”, but also worsening stuff. I’d say a farmer farming in a sustainable way might have a near 0 gdp compared to Sama, but environmentally is much better.
Agree that not all gdp is equal or beneficial. However, I think most people would be remiss to the idea of giving up on science and technology and a return to the agricultural era.
Agree, to clarify, I’m specifically skeptical of the US GDP as much of it seems of a very bubble-like and speculative nature. Tesla (stock) pre NVIDIA was probably the poster boy for the longest of times.
GDP doesn't differentiate between good and bad things and for climate change it would be border line circular because natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are "good" for the GDP (reconstruction effort is a net positive, destruction itself is not subtracted).
It would be a lot fairer to display tons of CO2 per inhabitant I think.
And that's before taking into account imported CO2.