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You’re ignoring the economies of scale of the human civilization. A car comes from a factory which services millions of humans, so there isn’t any reason to bel

by mirker 5y ago

You’re ignoring the economies of scale of the human civilization. A car comes from a factory which services millions of humans, so there isn’t any reason to believe that it’s as simple as scaling individual usage. There are a ton of pollution factors which are not at an individual-level. For example, US military is a huge emission producer and is not an individual emission. The only reason it exists is because there is a large group of people (a country) who allocated resources for warfare. It is unlikely for the military to scale linearly with respect to population (at small scale, you’d have a militia).

mytailorisrich 5y ago
Look at all the graphs, population, emissions, economic output, wealth, since 1900... Look at China and the result of becoming richer. I am not trying to put forward an exact formula here, but population and individual consumption (that is, wealth) are key factors and I suspect a fit would contain those two quantities as factors. Regarding economies of scale, ultimately what counts is the number of cars, not the factory that produces them... again that boils down to population x individual consumption. The US military can do what they do because of the strength of the US economy, which is again correlated, if not proportional, to population x individual consumption.
- mirker 5y ago
  The carbon cost of producing a car is the same as the cost of driving it [1]. Sure, for the sake of argument, you can say that each person has 1 new car per lifetime, but it’s really hard to say definitively how all the carbon is being moved through the economy. I think actually tracking this is more productive than just focusing on human population. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    > The carbon cost of producing a car is the same as the cost of driving it OK... and so the important bit is still the number of cars, which is directly linked to the number of people and how much they consume. This is inescapable.

by mirker 5y ago

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Look at all the graphs, population, emissions, economic output, wealth, since 1900... Look at China and the result of becoming richer. I am not trying to put forward an exact formula here, but population and individual consumption (that is, wealth) are key factors and I suspect a fit would contain those two quantities as factors. Regarding economies of scale, ultimately what counts is the number of cars, not the factory that produces them... again that boils down to population x individual consumption. The US military can do what they do because of the strength of the US economy, which is again correlated, if not proportional, to population x individual consumption.

mirker 5y ago
The carbon cost of producing a car is the same as the cost of driving it [1]. Sure, for the sake of argument, you can say that each person has 1 new car per lifetime, but it’s really hard to say definitively how all the carbon is being moved through the economy. I think actually tracking this is more productive than just focusing on human population. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  > The carbon cost of producing a car is the same as the cost of driving it OK... and so the important bit is still the number of cars, which is directly linked to the number of people and how much they consume. This is inescapable.