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Comment by rrrazdan | Hacker News Reader

I will still make that argument, why should a poor guy living in isolated tribal land in India find his dream of basic electricity a bit farther, while people in Europe can take the moral high ground and still pollute nearly an order of magnitude than an Indian.

Also the pollution in the last two-three centuries has been primarily First World led. Tell me how can Im as an Indian, tell the guy that he will have to wait some more time till we can get him to a basic living standard because cheaper options to get you there are off the table.

Per capita human emissions should be equal within reasonable bounds of geographical needs?

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For that poor guy living in isolated tribal land in India, the cheapest, easiest, and most direct path to electricity - by far - is solar panels.

Burning coal also contributes heavily to air pollution, which is already terrible in Indian cities. And air pollution isn't just a minor unpleasantness - it has a real impact on life expectancy.

Europe, America, and China are taking real steps to limit their greenhouse emissions. It's working, albeit very slowly. If India and the rest of the developing world don't follow suit, it's going to be a sad story.

I doubt many are suggesting they do wait more time, just that they do it a bit better.

It is in the interests of Indians, as well as the rest of the globe, to try and short-cut past a lot of development that went on in the first world - precisely to avoid the horrific pollution that resulted from our lack of knowledge or greed. The first world should be assisting this.

By avoiding a lot of the smoke-stack development that the West went through they'd end up in a better overall place.

Meanwhile developing nations need to stop accepting our old crap (ships for scrapping, old TVs, stuff collected via roadside "recycling" such as UK cardboard) for disassembly on beaches. The sooner the First World owns the whole problem, the better.

You're pretending there is no a trade-off here, and that just isn't true.

Not at all. Hence my feeling the West should be assisting in making this happen - it's as much in our interests too after all.

You can't "do it a bit better" without human sacrifice today. At any level of first world assistance, that trade-off exists.

There's what's fair, and there's saving the planet.

Except you need the Indian and Chinese person to accept a worse quality of life for the cuts to work. It's tough to make that argument when it doesn't feel fair (and even tougher to get it to stick)

If weather patterns change to the point that agriculture collapses the poor jealous Indian villagers won't be any better off.

It's unfortunately true that you need to get them to accept a slightly stunted quality of life. But expecting him/her/them to do that without leading by example and also making sacrifices is the highest order of duchebaggery.

Dont say "saving the planet". The planet will be here for a long (long) time. No matter how hot or cold it ll be.

Fine, saving civilization. Saving the environment. In the case of India, saving their kids... What's 2 more Celsius going to mean for droughts and heatwaves in India? Worst-case scenario we're talking about hundreds of millions f refugees fleeing countries that are no longer suitable for human habitation.

I'd say humans are much more resilient than you think, and Indians probably even more so, because they are used to hard life.

Or, to say it another way, many parts of India or other countries at this latitude have never been "suitable for human habitation" compared to e.g. France and her tempered climate. But humans adapted to this place, and will adapt to 2 degrees more if needs be.

This pedantry is not constructive.

I'm not sure it's pedantry. We're so used to the pretty Hollywood storyline that I think people assume that any climate issue will just turn out okay in the end. But of course, Nature doesn't have the capacity for happy endings — that's a human construction. We could easily become nothing but a footnote in the history of the planet, if we're not careful here.

Pretty much every species which has roamed the planet has gone extinct. Nature is tough. I think that's the point of emphasizing the phrasing.

Allocating every country the same per-capita quota of emission would be both fair, _and_ would save the planet, if the quota is low enough and exchangeable. But that would imply that we, the high per-capita polluting countries would pay money to poor countries like India to buy their excess quota.

Fair would also be to impose a maximum fertility rate. When the fertility rate is off the charts for the developing countries, unfair is the per capita quota.

If the goal is for humanity to survive on this planet, then clearly an exponential growth in population isn't sustainable. More fair would be to have quotas per square meter actually.

Sure let's have quotas per sq meter of arable land adjusted for number of crops you can grow in a year? Or better still on yield of the soil. Makes more sense than a straight per sq m quota.

A voter living in squalor may not see it the same way, especially when the more fortunate ones are not making the same sacrifices.

If climate change gets worse it's not going to be rich people in London and New York getting hit with droughts, famine, tsunamis, etc.

It's really in their own best interest to take it more seriously.

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