> China emits 10 billion tons of CO2 annually, compared to the UK’s 358 million. That means whatever the UK does just matters very little to the overall problem of mitigating climate change.
I don’t think it follows from that that “the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in the UK to use less“. China has 31 provinces, so if you look at China’s emissions by province, there will be quite a few that are at the level of CO2 emissions of the UK or below it. By your logic, that would mean the actual climate change problem isn’t getting people in those provinces to use less.
If so, who has to do something?
> It’s figuring out how to accommodate western standards of living in Asia and Africa without a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
If we can do that, we can cut the UK’s emissions, too.
I also think it’s not about ‘raising’ the world to what the west currently does, but about changing western standards of living. I think there’s substantial room for decreasing CO2 emissions without decreasing well-being (thought experiment: would people be less happy if the airplane hadn’t been invented? If we had run out of oil in 1980?)