Hats 2 B Shed wrote:
Emissions per capita is the only rational way to look at it for crying out loud.
PLEASE TRY TO GROW A BRAIN. It is painful to read such stupidity.
This is a naive statement as it unfairly penalizes those countries that produce the goods that people use and produce them most efficiently. For instance, Saudi Arabia has a high per capita CO2 per capita as they are pumping a large proportion of the worlds oil relative to their population because they have the highest yield reserves in the world (they require the least amount of energy to extract). If you were to penalize them, it would increase the global price of oil and encourage the production of oil from less efficient sources (like the shale oil we have here or the tar sands they have in Alberta that requires a higher energy expenditure per barrel, which is why they can only be produced when oil prices are high). Europe has a low CO2 per capita, but that is partly due to the fact that they are importing natural gas from Russia and petroleum from Iran (that both have much higher CO2 per capita). Likewise, if you look at US states, a lot of the fly over states have much higher CO2 production per capita than locations on the coast. On the coast you have people living in densely packed cities with efficient transportation they show relatively low CO2 footprints solely because the footprint for the goods they use, the food they consume, etc. are all shown where those goods are produced (in places like America's heartland or in China where they are shipped across an ocean).
Drastic action on climate change would penalize the places where goods are produced most efficiently, would encourage their production in locales where they are produced less efficiently (much in the same way as environmental legislation and union pressure shifted manufacturing from the USA to China in the first place) and would cause drastic price increases which would cause an immediate global market crash (or would simply move manufacturing to developing nations that would be exempted much as the same way as previous legislation led to the rapid growth of China and India in the past two centuries). Those small island nations that fear being impacted by climate change would see their economies crash over night as tourism (which is the largest component of most island economies) would grind to a halt as very few people would be willing to pay 5 times as much for an airline ticket and they would likely be unable to feed their populations (as most islands have grown well beyond the level of self sufficiency and are dependent upon food imports from places like the United States). Every airline would go bankrupt, every oil and gas company would go belly up, large areas of the country would no longer be economically viable, etc. You can either gradually implement policies that have a positive effect on the environment over time or you can grind everything to a halt and collapse to global economy in the process.