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Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

> Activists are calling for the Global North to provide at least 5 trillion U.S. dollars annually in public finance to the Global South as a down payment on their climate debt to those least responsible for climate change but most affected by it.

Huh? I'm pretty sure the Global South produces significantly more carbon emissions than the Global North. Like double. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong?)

From a quick Jupyter CSV excursion:

    Region
    North    13307.26
    South    24518.75
    Name: Emissions, dtype: float64

(based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...)

(edit: updated, miscategorized Australia)

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Okay but what are the numbers per population? If you include 80% of the world population in south it's quite unsurprising that they constitute a large part of the emissions.

Besides, the debt is something accumulated over time. Even if the emissions of India are large today they were much lower 40 years ago, while European emissions were probably larger at that time.

"Global South" doesn't mean literally countries in the Southern hemisphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South

I know? I am using that page as a reference.

> I am using that page as a reference.

Where? I don't know if your comment had the actual lists of countries in the global north and south previously but it doesn't have it now.

In any case, your analysis is incomplete. It's missing per-capita emissions and cumulative historical emissions.

No it didn't the list is too long...I had originally included Australia in the GS but moved it to the GN as per that wiki page. Here's the list I ended up with: https://pastebin.com/f50S0TNa. (Some minor errors still in there, like North Korea and Taiwan are incorrectly labeled.)

Of course my "analysis" is incomplete, I wasn't trying to do a complete analysis, just get an idea for where all the carbon emissions come from. Apparently ~2/3 comes from the Global South (currently). Forecasting models don't have normative parameters.

Edit: NM, putting Australia but not China in the global north is an odd use of north and south.

Aren't China and India in the Global South? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South

Personally I don’t think China is a developing economy at this point. ~25k per capita GDP (PPP) and sub 5% economy growth per year. India by contrast is just 11k per capita GDP (PPP).

I'd maybe agree, not sure. I'm mostly interested in figuring out what the "activist demands" are, specifically. On the surface using these common definitions, they seem a bit extreme.

The South emits a lot producing products consumed in the North

We export our pollution to them...

I sense that no matter what the situation would be, people will always find a way to blame "the North" for everything and anything in the world, and absolve "the South" from everything and anything that they do. It's religion at this point.

If we stopped exporting our pollution to them, then their economies would collapse (because the pollution is caused by export-producing industries).

So isn't the North already paying the South for this pollution?

No, because market prices don't account for environmental externalities. Attempts to make them account for environmental externalities just cause industry to move to countries where they don't, which is what already happened.

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