Climate

Sure that's one way to look at it but it's short sighted in my view. From the other perspective it comes across as the West saying they could pollute as much as they wanted to in order give their people a better life and now everyone else has to operate under strict constraints or get a finger wagging from the largest contributers to CO2 emissions in human history. That's a lot of hypocrisy.

You're right that solar panels do exist now. It should be noted that China has done more with renewables and getting ICE vehicles off the road than any Western country, many of which seem to be stuck in old habits. Nations like India and China are developing on a massive scale, actively integrating renewables into their expanding grids as they pull hundreds of millions out of poverty.

The average person in India and China contributes substantially less to global emissions than the average Westerner. So as their emissions increase, rather than seeing it as them cancelling out your efforts, you should be flattered that they want to live with the luxuries and privileges youve had for some time now. They are in no way less worthy of that.

Perhaps Western nations should be contributing less per capita than developing nations, as a way to offset their historically disproportionate contribution.

The problem is that EU can't compete on price. However, as they are long term it is not as much of a risk to install foreign technology that is not necessary to internet connect.

The EU is reducing, which is why per capits is important. We can see what is possible. Clearly the USA is not doing well. China has made huge inroads in green energy and I think it's a combination of wanting to be at the forefront of new technology and a need for energy security.

As it stands, china is about triple the EU, while manufacturing for them. The USA is just burning carbon for no reason as they no longer manufacture. This will worsen until ai bubble pops. They have quite a bit of nuclear power though. Their oil based economy is just too ingrained. Similar to Saudi Arabia. Why bother reducing when oil is cheap.

I fully expect tariffs in carbon pricing to be the next trade tariff globally. Whyake the hard cuts that cost.more on your internal market when the competition does it cheaper and doesn't care about environmental effects. It forces incentives to do the right thing and prevents the externalization of costs.

There is a massive issue with adjusting for trade though. If you just imagine a country lets call it Green, which has no emissions, and a another country Black, which is fully run on dirty fossil fuels. Now when both countries trade, the Green country imports emissions and the Black ones are lowered. It can be that dirty processes have been outsourced to the Black country or you can just have the Green country do things better.

When you take the EU and China you can see both. There are absolutely dirty processes outsourced to China, but at the same time things like electricity are dirtier in China then in the EU.

Tough argument to make. Nation states are a somewhat arbitrary construct. What if China or India were each four countries instead of one? Should we take geographical area into account? This is why the per capita measure is important.

The UAE is land mass less than 2% the size of India and China and relies on desalination plants for habitibillity. Why would either India or China have populations that small, while not having such limitations?

It's easy to say less humans is the solution (and don't worry, the world is clearly headed that direction looking at global fertility rates) but saying a specific country having less people is part of the solution, especially when it's a country with lower per capita emissions, seems difficult to justify.

Historically, USA is still the leading source of total pollution since the industrial revolution.

China is at least progressing nicely. While America regresses.

You one of those what if'ers, eh?

Countries defined by arbitrary lines are just a group of arbitrary number of people.

You can reduce Australia's emissions even more by declaring that every Australian is a separate country, every David, John, Peter in Australia will have many times lower emissions than entire country of India, consisting 1.3 billion people.