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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

>With the US being no where near China and India in CO2 production I think it’ll be fine.

Until you look at per capita consumption.

The per capita argument makes sense from a human perspective, even for any culture globally, as it is an appeal to fairness and equality.

However, the natural phenomena governing the planet's weather does not care about anything other than absolute CO2.

Fair or not, absolute CO2 is the number that matters for the planet.

We can come up with a mitigation or fairness mechanism, but in the end the planet works just like a virus or a script, it's a complex mechanism that you cannot negotiate or reason with.

The planet also doesn’t care about political borders; it doesn’t make sense to say “this arbitrary geographic area has more CO2 than this arbitrary area, so therefore the latter area is ‘fine’”.

This seems so obvious I can’t understand why people continue to compare country emissions. Break China into two countries and suddenly they are no longer at the top. Or look at the US by individual states instead and each state is way down the list, so no problem.

> We can come up with a mitigation or fairness mechanism, but in the end the planet works just like a virus or a script, it's a complex mechanism that you cannot negotiate or reason with.

From the perspective of humanity, particularly on this topic, the planet (and reality itself) runs on the human mind (a collection of them), and the human mind to some currently small degree, can be negotiated and reasoned with.

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