Do you want to go to war with China to enforce an environmentalist agenda?
China is in the middle of a massive expansion in wind, solar, and electric vehicles. The US is burning even more coal to support AI, and has gutted much of its federal emission reduction efforts.
Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.
That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
I know nothing about it. I have read comments on this very comments section, with references, that say China's emissions are not growing. This is what makes this subject so hard for the average numbskull like me, so much misinformation.
The EU has applied tariffs for climate reasons with the carbon border adjustment. The idea is for a country to have domestic climate standards, and then apply tariffs on importers who import from countries that don't meet those standards. It's a straightforward application of tariffs to ensure domestic manufacturers aren't undercut by foreign rivals that aren't required to meet the same standards and redirect importers to sources that do meet standards or at least come closer.
Carbon tax at home and carbon tariffs abroad is the only real economically sound strategy to nudge the economy towards emitting less.
And yes, that does likely mean taxing Chinese imports in the short term. The Chinese leadership does understand the risks of climate change as well or better than many other countries and is already pursuing enormous amounts of clean energy and emission standards, so I'd not expect the tariffs on Chinese imports to last long on an environmental or carbon basis.
Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.
The whole idea that we should look at 'emissions per capita' or 'historical emissions' in the interest of fairness is simply giving a license to governments to kill genuinely poor people in the third world.
How much of a problem any individuals CO2 emissions are is completely decoupled from what nation they live in, or how many people live in that nation specifically.
If you hypothetically split up Asia or the US into 100 smaller countries then local emissions are not suddenly more (or less) of a problem than the are now (duh).
And of course more people have more of an influence on global outcomes.
This whole argument makes about as much sense as demanding that black people in Europe should not pay any income tax, because the total tax income from black people in Europe is very low, and "national budget does not care about per capita".
That is why per capita is the correct measure.
The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.
Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.
We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.
The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.
The fairest system would be for each human being to have an equal amount of pollution they are allowed to emit.
And yet you say "historical emissions" is bullshit. How do you think we got to the current co2 PPM level?
