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If climate change was truly accepted to be a global endeavour, then the only reasonable metric by which to track progress is the per capita footprint. Today the

If climate change was truly accepted to be a global endeavour, then the only reasonable metric by which to track progress is the per capita footprint. Today the per capita footprint of the first world outweighs the rest of the world by orders of magnitude. And yet, the focus always seems to be on a country's total emissions, thus putting more onus on highly populated third world countries. How do we expect those people to buy into this bargain? The hard truth is that, if we are to make any progress on climate change, then first world countries must drastically cut their consumption and downgrade their lifestyles. That kind of a lifestyle is simply not sustainable across 8 billion people. But we cannot say that only some people are privileged to access that lifestyle, while the remaining must sacrifice to save the planet.

jacknews 4y ago
You could argue that having more children, leading to a larger national population is also a 'lifestyle choice'
- potamic 4y ago
  The people who made the lifestyle choice to have more children are long gone. We are not appealing to them. We are appealing to the people born today who are not responsible for the size of the population. It's ultimately a consequence of human progress that we face such population problem. A more reasonable approach towards this would be to share lands and resources and spread people out a bit. But that's a whole different problem and the first world would rather have policies to increase their own population size than immigrate people into their lands.
  - jacknews 4y ago
    The same with the west's polluting infrastructure, built decades ago. Focusing on how dirty the rich world is per capita just gives other nations an excuse to do nothing, even though some of them are now actually the bigger problem because of their huge population. The most telling measure is the growth (or otherwise) in emissions.
    - potamic 4y ago
      Changing existing infrastructure is obviously quite expensive. But relying less on infrastructure is not. Reducing energy expenditure, consuming fewer goods, immigrating people instead of outsourcing manufacturing, reducing military footprint (some first world militaries create as much carbon footprint as entire countries altogether), are all very reasonable sacrifices we can make to make the climate war more equitable across the human race.

jacknews 4y ago

You could argue that having more children, leading to a larger national population is also a 'lifestyle choice'

potamic 4y ago
The people who made the lifestyle choice to have more children are long gone. We are not appealing to them. We are appealing to the people born today who are not responsible for the size of the population. It's ultimately a consequence of human progress that we face such population problem. A more reasonable approach towards this would be to share lands and resources and spread people out a bit. But that's a whole different problem and the first world would rather have policies to increase their own population size than immigrate people into their lands.
- jacknews 4y ago
  The same with the west's polluting infrastructure, built decades ago. Focusing on how dirty the rich world is per capita just gives other nations an excuse to do nothing, even though some of them are now actually the bigger problem because of their huge population. The most telling measure is the growth (or otherwise) in emissions.
  - potamic 4y ago
    Changing existing infrastructure is obviously quite expensive. But relying less on infrastructure is not. Reducing energy expenditure, consuming fewer goods, immigrating people instead of outsourcing manufacturing, reducing military footprint (some first world militaries create as much carbon footprint as entire countries altogether), are all very reasonable sacrifices we can make to make the climate war more equitable across the human race.