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Why then would per-country emissions matter? Is Vatican City the best model of a sustainable climate paradise?

• josephcsible 3y ago
  > Why then would per-country emissions matter? It's because "per-" means different things in "per-capita" and "per-country". In "per-capita", we're dividing emissions by population to get a single number. In "per-country", we're listing the individual emissions of each country. If "per-country" were instead just the total global emissions divided by the number of countries of Earth, then it indeed wouldn't matter either. > Is Vatican City the best model of a sustainable climate paradise? Not necessarily, but it is the wrong place to focus if your goal is to reduce total emissions. Imagine trying to optimize a computer program that takes 4 hours to run. If one function's total runtime during the program's execution is 100 milliseconds, even if it's super inefficient and could be rewritten to run in 1 millisecond instead, doing so is not useful progress in speeding up the whole program.