Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

Total historic emissions is the ONLY serious metric. Since it accounts for all capital buildouts, it takes centuries of emission heavy construction to get developed countries where they are. Countries are going to emit more when they're in steel and concrete phase of nation building.

Does climate care about emissions? Does climate care about changing? No. Climate doesn't care it cycles back to ice age.

Humans (hypothetically) care about climate change. It's a fundmentally a geo-political problem, which means the solution is geopolitically agreed on metric. Currently it rhetorically per capita, but arguably it should be historic per capita, because per capita itself is geopolitic concession metric that shifts responsibility away from historic carbon debt of developed nations towards developing nations.

View on HN

Why does China have the right to "develop" when they are already one of the most advanced countries on the planet?

Do they get to advance until they're in first place? And then what? It stops there or does India get a shot at being first place? Then Nigeria?

Meanwhile what does the climate look like if every single country executes the China 1945-2025 playbook?

Because it's not uniformly developed, there's still 100s of millions who are underdeveloped. If we're sensible we'll cap a limit on what first place should emit per capita and that will be the benchmark everyone targets / settles at. Right now that's high income per capita emissions. Realistically, it doesn't stop until some agreed/enforced per capital emission ceiling and if that agreed ceiling takes us to 4/5/6 degrees then that's where we're going to settle. Ultimately the fair requirement is suggest countries have X historic per captia emissions adjustment to unfuck themselves / prepare for climate change. If wealthy countries are generous they can subsidize the transition, but we know that's unlikely so really it's about how (or whether) to mitigate the free for all.

In an even fairer world, huge renewable exporters would get credit / per capita adjustments for exporting net renewable and fossil exporers would get opposite. Oh and countries with high TFR or advanced economies with high immigration that multiplies an immigrant's emission (i.e. poor -> rich flow) would get penalized. But that's even less likely to happen because it's obvious whose interest these sensible proposals undermine, because climate change isn't a scientific of enviromental problem, it's a geopolitcal one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com