You are looking at the acceleration but without looking at the initial state.
A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t
A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting
USA 14.3 t, China 8.8 t, EU 5.5 t, India 2.2 t
It is right because all the planet cares about is the amount in the atmosphere.
It is completely wrong because whatever total amount X of CO2 emissions we decide we need to limit humanity to, we have to somehow allocate that CO2 emission budget to people.
Unless you can make a good case that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share than others the only way to do it is for every person to have the same share. (Maybe on top of that there can be some system of trading, so that people whose emissions go toward things that the world finds more useful can trade for a bigger share, but it would still have to start from everyone is equal).
Since it is countries that would be the ones actually enforcing whatever the limit is, the country effectively ends up as the entity in charge of the shares of all its population, making the allocation at the country level equal on a per capita basis between countries.
Another way to see that anything other than per capita is nonsense is that anything else would allow groups of people to manipulate their allocation by splitting the country into multiple countries or merging multiple countries into one.
That is not a very good idea.
Think about it, just breeding more people would give humanity a bigger share.
Much better to let every square mile (or some other arbitrary region) have a share and divide that among the people living there. Higher population density would translate to less shares per person.
If this really happened it would incentivize genocide against less developed nations.
1. Get rich from cheap coal
2. Pull up the ladder behind you
I'm sure everyone will comply.
We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.
Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.
Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.
Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.
Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).
Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.
So split the country up fixes the problem. Yes, it's dumb, but you agreed with it...
I agree the USA has grown more steadily than the EU and the American software/tech industries have a leg up but the devil is in the details.
I travel a lot for work to the USA and I do not experience what this GDP growth has brought to the US in the past 10-15 years: infrastructure in general is worse (worse airports, worse roads, etc.), urban life is worse, rural life is worse, quality of food is worse.
[0] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...