Per capita is misleading. China has over 1 billion people more than the US, the majority of them in abject poverty. Same for India; so their per capita number is artificially skewed downward.
Are you a time traveler from 1990? China effectively doesn't have anyone in extreme poverty ($1.50/day). They have about the same or lower rate than the US.
They do have people in poverty, 24% below $5.50/day ($2000/yr) line.
India has also decreased extreme poverty, down to 2% in 2023. At $3.20/day, they declined to 21%. At $5.50, they are at 81%. Most people are poor, but less poor than they were.
Not sure if your answer is intended to be serious or sarcastic. But there is a justifiable argument for it -- you have new humans to take care of, who have needs, and the same moral claim as anyone else in the world nto address those needs using fossil fuels.
On the other hand, there's no reason to think that an increase in the number of countries is a valid excuse to increase emissions.
Leading to the conclusion: those few people (government) who have the greatest influence over the problem (over the countries with the largest emissions in real terms, not per person) somehow don't have the responsibility.
It's true that if a country splits into two countries, that doesn't give them a right to emit more collectively. However, it does mean that each country now has little control over what the other one does, and less ability to actually solve the collective problem we want solving, which was the objective here.
It's great if China is genuinely going renewable. I read about this often. But I also read that they're the biggest producers of coal (confusingly both the biggest importers and exporters, and consumers). Still, maybe that's being phased out.
But why do you want to "slice up" emissions at all, if you're interested in reducing them? The problem is a big load of gas. So identify the biggest emitters (in total volume) with the most control over it. Don't say "oh San Marino, you're a really greedy country, with all your tax haven shenanigans and conspicuous consumption and more cars than people, you're the problem", because they really aren't. They may be really awful, but that wasn't the question and isn't something it's viable to fix, nor are they capable of helping more than minutely, unlike a giant authoritarian state with giant emissions, capable of helping a lot. And perhaps, as you point out, already doing so.
> But I also read that they're the biggest producers of coal (confusingly both the biggest importers and exporters, and consumers).
Yep. And their coal plants are less and less needed. They are essentially becoming peakers (in the same manner as many modern gas plants) for when the sun don't shine and the wind stops blowing. But in terms of the biggest producers of coal, Australia punches above its weight, but rarely does anyone single it out in these discussions. They also are the second biggest per-capita consumers in terms of CO2 emissions.
>Australia punches above its weight, but rarely does anyone single it out in these discussions. They also are the second biggest per-capita consumers in terms of CO2 emissions.
Our (Australia's) fuckwit right-wing politicians love to blame climate change on China and the USA, because their absolute emissions are way higher than ours and "we emit less than 1% of the world's emissions" so us taking the first step is pointless (says THEM).
Also, because our coal is relatively clean they say that stopping coal mining would actually make emissions worse, because then everyone would just switch to much more polluting foreign coal.
Every American in this thread who says "<China/India> have the most emissions, they need to reduce their CO2 output" needs to understand that the same logic can be and is used against them to justify us doing fuck-all about the climate. Stop enabling our fuckwits!
I'm not sure I come to that conclusion. At least, that's not how I think about responsibility.
I'd say that per capita emissions is a reasonable measure of scoring how much a country and its people are doing to make climate change worse (or better). And, while not perfectly so, it does a reasonable job as being an actionable metric for how sustainable a country's standard of living is. "America (14.4 t/cap/yr) should try to be more like Japan (8.6 t/cap/yr)" is a reasonable take on how the US can reduce its per-capita emissions, and what changes might take it there. "America (4.8 Gt/yr) should try to be more like the United Arab Emirates (220 Mt/yr)" ends up being rather bad advice.
And while the standard of living in Iceland is quite nice, I doubt that there's any practical way that either China or the United States could reduce their emissions to that level (3.5 Mt/yr) in the short term without millions of people starving to death in the process. It wouldn't be realistic or fair for Iceland to demand that the US cut its emissions to Icelandic levels on an absolute basis (but very fair and reasonable to demand that the US cut to Icelandic levels on a per-capita basis).
In terms of how much responsibility a government has, well... certainly governments that govern more people do have more leverage, and with larger total emissions, there are more opportunities to cut. But if there is any non-zero level that we may consider an acceptable emissions target, surely this level should be proportional to a country's population. And when it comes to international agreements, it's reasonable to ask China and India to make cuts, and it's very reasonable for China and India to say "OK we'll make cuts, but we expect small rich countries like Canada to pull their weight, and if they don't, we won't either".
And when that happens, per-capita emissions is the only sensible way to gauge if those countries are pulling their weight.
There are, after all, a lot of countries, and while the top four (China, US, India, Russia) emit 57% of the total, the rest emit the other 43% of that total, with no single country among them emitting over 2.9%. Even cutting China, the US, India, and Russia's emissions to zero would only cut global emissions in about half, and that's really still not enough to solve the problem, so the little countries will have to pitch in.
Who is 'they' here? Certainly there was a one-child policy. I don't think it could be said that the consequence of female abortion and infanticide was the intention (or even an expected consequence) of the policy.
It seems that many people in the comments are set on demonizing the country. For this I think better points to raise are the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur 'reeducation' program, or the usurping of peaceful autonomous neighbors like Tibet and Hong Kong (maybe Taiwan later). But none of this has anything to do with obligations around CO2 emissions, which they are addressing more than any country on the planet, as I've commented elsewhere:
