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Comment by jmknoll | Hacker News Reader

China's GDP appears to be about 20% export-driven. Subtracting this still leaves China the greatest polluter in the world, and by a large margin, the greatest polluter per unit of GDP, which is the real measure we should be looking at.

Also, you have it backwards. CCP had the option to create an export-driven economy, as well as the option on how to power it. Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."

The Chinese government has a lot of agency, and a lot of culpability, in this.

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> Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."

No, but experience has shown that that is the surest path to economic development - probably the only viable path for a country the size of China. A small city state might be able to develop by establishing itself as a financial or shipping hub, but for a giant country of 1.4 billion people to go from utter poverty to wealth, there's a good argument that it first has to turn itself into the world's factory.

Why should we look at pollution per GDP? I'd contest that pollution per capita is a more humanistic, less capitalistic view, and helps contextualize some geographic features better than GDP.

If your concern is efficiency of production, than pollution per unit of GDP is valid. If you want fairness based on population, then you can look at pollution per person, but that metric won’t really tell you how/where things can be improved.

What it does show is that China’s CO2 use is mainly industrial while in America it is much more personal

Seems like an absurd measure when comparing service versus production driven economies. GDP doesn’t measure whether you sold 1 million copies of a film, or manufactured the cameras out of raw materials to produce them. Obviously one has a significantly more linear relationship to carbon output than the other.

If it's geographically, then don't account per capita. Account absolute values per country.

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