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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

Is 'per capita' a useful metric other than to give the largest emitters some sort of retort?

One person living alone on a private island who cooks food on a fire several times a day might have a really high 'per capita' score, but in the grand scheme of things it's utterly irrelevant.

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So the solution to climate change is to break up China into smaller countries that have emissions that are utterly irrelevant!

The mathematical analysis solution!

Even that would be tricky, they’ve got a couple cities that are bigger than the median EU country.

Better than the perverse incentive to encourage population growth and hold quality of living down.

China doesn't have to do anything because they've convinced the world that per-capita matters. It doesn't matter.

I'm also willing to bet China's population is smaller than they say. And I'd also bet their emissions are higher than they say. Nothing that comes out of China's mouth can be trusted.

In your opinion what should pollution be measured as a function of? If you choose not to measure it per capita, then every country, no matter how large or small will be measured equally, setting up perverse incentives for smaller countries to have pollution heavy environments.

> what should pollution be measured as a function of?

Consumption? China is a huge emitter, but a large percentage of that comes from making products destined for America and Europe. IMO the emissions for those products should be assigned to the country that is purchasing them.

what about per square km? Or per GDP, since emissions are loosely tied to production, we could gauge efficiency?

If all he does is cooking food on fire, he definitely won’t have a high per capita score, per capita by definition gives you an average. If he does below average than your average western citizen, the score of his country will be less of that.

We obviously have to account for it per capita — you would surely not allow as little CO2 emission for China as you would to, say, Hungary. Like, that would be completely unfair.

China and India have over a billion people. “Fair” doesn’t matter. Impact matters.

"Fair" is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for cooperation, which itself is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for solving the problem.

It's also much easier to convince someone that "no more X for you" is fair if you have a cheaper and better alternative to X. We're getting there for that.

If the world was a democracy, the needs of the many would outweigh the needs of the few .

Countries are very arbitrary lines on a geopolitical map.

Take Europe and India, they have roughly similar landmass , number of people and linguistic diversity so why European states get their own measures and Indian states do not ?

If you don’t measure per capita , you are effectively seeing all humans are not equal, some have more rights and privileges than others , that is dangerously close to how slavery operated

So you get to have a larger economic footprint because you are not Chinese or Indian?

Yes because we polute to provide for people. You wouldn't expect the USA to absolutely polute the same amount as Liechtenstein.

But what if the US provides more? We have to consider what each person gets per unit of pollution.

Hypothetically, nation A could generate pollution wastefully, while nation B could do so less wastefully, but provide 10x as much.

Eg.

“ The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com.”

https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d...

It is a bit weird that we need so many emissions per person in the US. In the very least it ought to be a sign of where there’s slack in the system.

People survive for fraction of emissions in other places. So why would it not be reasonable for people in USA to do exactly the same?

I was thinking about that. On one hand, per capita tells you the relative use per person, which is useful for who consumes the most (most wasteful lifestyle). We know this will almost always be America.

On the other hand, we could measure per gdp and see who generated the most value from that pollution. This would probably help the US relative to other nations in ranking. It may hint at how efficiently the consumption is.

Of course economic output isn’t everything in life, there’s other ways to determine value and fairness and all that, but it’s be an interesting comparison to per capita.

Eg. The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com.

https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d...

The alternative would be to say that Americans are worth more than Chinese (and Europeans and everyone else) and have a God given right to emit twice as much.

I guess it would be the Europeans who are worth the most, right? Since they have smaller countries.

Unless we were to consider the whole of the EU as the unit of carbon-blame.

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