Oh, I'm sure liberals will gloat and be happy the grumpy conservatives are at the table, and everyone will agree on the importance of the problem. Then both sides will fight over who funds the solution. Liberals say big oil creates the problem and must fund the solution, conservatives will say the public demands the oil and is affected by the problem and must fund the solution. Nobody will agree to anything and the world will burn anyway.
Whenever this point is brought up it’s suspiciously blind to the concept of per-capita emissions.
China and India have enormous populations. Their per-capita emissions are low.
Unless you’re arguing a position that some folks in the world are inherently more deserving of a better quality of their life beyond mere circumstance, it doesn’t make sense to raise the ‘per-nation’ measure of emissions over the per-person measure.
There is greatest scope for emissions reduction in nations where per-capita emissions are highest. American citizens need to be converned primarily about how to reduce America’s emissions. Chinese citizens need to be concerned primarily about how to reduce China’s emissions. Everyone is already best placed to exert political pressure and carry out grassroots change on their respective home turf.
Targets for nations have already been established in inter-governmental negotiations and re-litigating the basic figures in individual citizen discussion is pointless at best, actively distracting at worst.
There are also issues of how to account for the same set of carbon emissions.
Suppose a Chinese factory uses electricity supplied by coal to manufacture a product. The product is shipped to the United States aboard a Korean container ship before being shipped by diesel train to Seattle, where it is delivered to a retailer by truck, purchased, plugged into the wall and powered by a combination of hydroelectric and natural gas energy. In this scenario, many of the carbon emissions can be counted as Korean or Chinese even though the end consumer is American.
The flip side of this is that the United States can also directly affect Chinese carbon emissions by simply buying fewer Chinese products.
Edit: Also, since China is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not like Chinese people can pressure their government very much.
CO2 doesn't decay in the short term so talking about current production is meaningless. You have to consider cumulative emissions [0] if you want to talk about fairness.
These are cumulative figures since 1751. In other words over 200 years of emissions before anyone knew what the consequences would be, and decades after that when the consequences weren’t widely understood. At least current figures are fair in the sense of accounting for who’s making it worse.
I was going to come back and change "conservatives will say the public" to "conservatives will say the public and other countries", but you beat me to it.
