4 ms·

Everyone knows it has to happen, one way or another. If the US can hide behind 'but China isn't reducing emissions' then so can China hide behind the US. etc. e

• Ekaros 4y ago
  And in my mind emission per capita is only metric that is fair. And it should be calculated to include exports and imports thus transferring the emissions to where the goods produced are actually consumed.
  • ragebol 4y ago
    Yep. And given all those 'Made in China' labels, it's a big exporter too, transferring more CO2 to consumers. The picture does not become better looking for (us) Westerners
    • epistasis 4y ago
      This is not very true if you look at the numbers. Manufacturing stuff is a pretty tiny proportion of emissions, and even if you shift all of China's manufacturing emissions back to the countries that import, it's barer a blip. I ran the numbers a few years ago to see what personal actions I could take. (Even though climate change is a collective action problem, not a personal action problem.) In the US, stopping buying so much stuff isn't much of a climate action, at least not nearly as much as switching off driving a gas car, changing your natural gas water heater to electric, ir changing a natural gas furnace to a heat pump.
  • dllthomas 4y ago
    I don't have a better suggestion, but emissions per Capita isn't necessarily fair. For instance adding another horrifically oppressed person can't mean that the elite of that country "deserve" to be able to emit more CO2. It's somewhat less clear how that should extend to economic inequality, of how it should apply in individual real world cases, but it does seem a flaw of the model.