> Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
The United States would be one of the most heavily tariffed countries in the world, if we go down that road. China would be... Middle of the pack.
> Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
Again the obsession over per capita data, which totally obscure the fact that the US per capita emissions have been in a constant decline over the last 20 years while China's have been growing at an uncontrolled pace.
Which behavior should we incentivize, unrestrained pollution because they "aren't THE worst yet" or hard work curbing emissions?
A constant decline when they started at an incredibly high starting point still puts it at much worse than other countries.
I don't care about 'trying' or 'trends'. I care about current results. That's the behaviour we should incentivize. Results. Not 'projected results maybe 20 years from now.'
Oh, and by the way, China's per-capita emissions peaked in ~2013, and have been ~slowly declining since then. [1] If current trends continue without any change, it's going to take another 24 years for the US to hit their level of emissions. [2]
It's odd that whenever people grouse about China's emissions, they never make note of either of those two facts...
The climate doesn't care which datapoint you cherry-picked your starting and ending ratios from. It cares about the current rate of emissions.
I really should not have to explain on this forum that when you multiply two numbers together, the values of both multipliers matter. Seven times nearly-nothing is not very much. Point-seven times a lot is... Still a lot. It's basic arithmetic.
The climate doesn't care about per capita. It's strictly the emissions. If you want to care about per capita numbers you should also care about human development index numbers. It's not the same thing to put 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while doing nothing the quality of life of the global population as compared to putting 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while raising the standard of living the global population. We should be striving for lowering CO2, but let's not pretend that all emissions are the same.
The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy to drag you to the bottom together.
If you don't want to take per-capita emissions into account, and want to look at absolute numbers, then the US has an even smaller carbon budget to work with - and its way exceeding it.
But okay, let's look at per-capita development times quality of life, instead. (China is ~15% behind the US on the latter - does that mean that its per-capita budget should be dropped by a comparative 15%? It's still doing well by that metric.)
You must realize that development is only possible because of access to energy, services, and material goods. Cut the energy, transportation, and services available to the average American by a factor of 3, as a proxy for bringing it's emissions profile down to China's, and tell me - what will happen to its quality of life?
(My prediction is - a sharp decline, followed by a bloody revolution.)
Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
The United States would be one of the most heavily tariffed countries in the world, if we go down that road. China would be... Middle of the pack.