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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Naive is only considering the absolute amount of emissions within some arbitrarily drawn lines on a map.

The only metric that is fair, and countries like China will consider fair, is per-capita emissions. A Canadian can't justify causing three times as many CO2 emissions as a Chinese by virtue of being Canadian alone.

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Per-capita emissions may be fair if it looked at where products are consumed, but in my experience the data only looks at emissions produced divided by population. Producer countries like China and especially Canada with their energy industry will look worse than they actually are because other countries have effectively outsourced their CO2 emissions to these countries.

That's very true.

You have the option of either attributing these emissions to the consuming country, or to not do so and hope that it creates a trade-equilibrium as a side-effect, where each country produces within their CO2 limits.

Either way, even though China is a producer country and far from being clean or sustainable, its emissions are still way behind certain large first world countries.

We (that is North America and the heart of Europe save France) really need to make more of an effort, only if to not look like massive hypocrites when we ask China to turn green.

There is a large push towards nuclear within China right now though - with a lot of research coming out of that country as well - they might beat us to the punch anyways.

> that is North America and the heart of Europe save France

Rest assured that France is really keen on carbonising its electricity supply and closing a significant number of its nuclear plants, thus going back into the fold of its European neighbours. Stupidity knows no border.

We do have that data:

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...

Thanks very much! Following through a list of source links this seems to be the primary source for that data:

https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/9/3247/2012/bg-9-3247-201...

Staking the future of the climate on trusting countries to be fair is childish thinking.

The ONLY metric that matters is global gigatons of CO2 emitted per year. This needs to decrease. Playing hand waving games with per capita between countries is pure nonsense and provides cover for emitters.

I was trying to highlight the insulting nature of the post I replied to by repeating the same insult verbatim.

I wasn't trying to start a comment chain where everyone's comment is prefaced with "You're naive/childish/stupid".

Countries are sovereign units of control that we've divided ourselves into. To actually get some meaningful work done we have to hold some countries into account. Example: the US obviously needs to be held to account for pulling out of the Paris agreement, since it's the worst offender in both per-capita and total consumption-based emissions, despite having the capabilities to change that (being rich).

yes we can. We live in a more northern environment, necessitating high CO2 emissions. Maybe not three times, but factor in the fact that Canadians are so distantly spread out adds more weight to the necessity of Canadians having higher CO2 emissions per-capita than China. It's not apples to apples comparison.

Why is it China's problem that Canadians choose to live in a northern climate in a "distantly spread out" fashion? They could just as easily argue that their higher absolute CO2 emissions is "necessary" given their higher population.

Every country can come up with a list of excuses as to why they should be entitled to produce CO2. At the end of the day we need to start with taking responsibility for our own emissions before we start telling other countries what to do.

Canada could blow up or start producing 10 times per person it wouldn't matter. Look at the global numbers. China is the world's problem if you believe in climate change.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/920/idt2/idt2/9cc12cf8-9b60-4f...

If Canada started producing 10x per person it would be the worlds second largest emitter. So yeah, it would matter.

Pretending this is exclusively China’s problem when the rest of the world produces 3/4 of global emissions and a significant percentage of China’s emissions are a result of demand from the West, is simply nonsensical.

We will not get out of this by focusing on spinning stats or trying to focus attention on per capita vs. absolute figures. This problem requires collective action.

CO2 emmissions should be allocated per great grand-parent and shared amongst all descendents equally. i.e. allocate on the population when the 3rd industrial revolution started.

Simple per-capita emissions unfairly favours those who like to procreate irresponsibly on a resource-constrained planet.

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