Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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The earth doesn't care how many people are emitting. It cares about the absolute emissions.

But obviously the earth is comprised of sovereign states, and in order to collaborate you often need to convince those sovereign states that treatment is fair. Given that, if you want to adjust emissions by some divisor, I'd adjust it by land area. Land area is finite on earth. That means that there is some value of CO2 output / m^2 that is sustainable for the planet. That number is consistent. That number applies globally. That number can be a target for everyone. It also can't be faked – some "unreliable" country can't say "hey, global body, you think our population is 1B but it's actually 1.2B, so we get to pollute more". You can't fudge land area like that (there might be some marginal ability to do so, but obviously it is less feasible than with per capita numbers). This has the additional benefit of aligning priorities against worsening conditions in order to incentivize action now. Global warming is causing rising sea levels, which in turn means that countries are losing land area. That means that every year that global warming worsens, your quota will actually decrease.

Meanwhile, population is not finite. If you say to a country as part of an agreement to "get your CO2 output down to this level per capita", then it is a very real possibility that this country's population grows to an extent where that number you used last year is no longer small enough to stave off serious global warming. And that is the purpose of all this, no?

Obviously carrots and sticks will be necessary for any agreement to be effective (until it gets really bad), but either way I think emissions/unit land area as the line in the sand makes more sense than emissions/per capita.

An even better metric would probably be "emissions/unit arable farmland", as it gives weight to both land area and population, but obviously that is much more difficult to establish / less likely to stay static.

This sounds very strange to me. Countries like Japan and Holland would be shafted, while countries like Russia could literally burn car tires all day. I think because of the vast differences in population density, quite a few countries would probably have to go to zero emissions, while others would have absolutely no reasonable limit. Australia, for instance, would probably have no limits under such a scheme.

Both measurements matter for different reasons. Absolute is how you model impact, per capita is how policies are applied.

If Russia were mostly undeveloped from the Urals to the Bering Sea, I would indeed be fine with them burning tires in Moscow all day.

If Russia started consciously farming carbon sinks across Siberia, they could burn tires in St. Petersburg, too.

Japan and Holland could farm algae and plankton in their oceanic EEZ, I suppose.

High population density for an entire country is arguably antithetical to the goals of reducing global warming. We want low population density, not high. So seems like this encourages exactly the right behavior.

But if you asked those people to spread out, wouldn't they use more resources? Longer distances to transport goods, more land to live on, less opportunities to walk or use mass transit, etc.

What I mean is that more people == bad. The single easiest way to eliminate global warming to have fewer people in general. Looking at per capita stats does the opposite – encourages more people so that even if it increases your absolute emissions, your per capita ones go down. This is not what you want.

Yes, there are obviously efficiency gains from cities. The whole problem is that those gains are not worth a densely packed cities capacity to just have more people, because the earth / global warming doesn't care about your efficiency, it cares about absolute numbers.

The earth doesn't care the arbitrary division of it in countries, and any per country stats. Countries are irrelevant from the earth's perspective. Countries are an abstract concept. So saying that a smaller country means more license to use more energy seems absurd. If Catalonia separates from Spain, are they suddenly eligible for 2x emissions?

But people are not an abstract concept. With or without countries, people need to eat, sleep, wear clothes, get entertainment, have devices, all of which emit carbon per capita. Saying that monaco and India should emit similar carbon makes absolutely zero sense.

People in the developed world simply can't sustain their energy intensive life style if we want to reduce carbon emissions.

If somehow we ended on a per country stats, it will simply encourage creation of fake countries. A country can split in 100, create a federation like EU, but more stronger to join those countries and keep business as usual.

Per land area might be a better metric with some tweaks.

Yes, per land area was my suggestion.

So should dense industrialized countries solve their climate contribution by annexing unindustrialized territory around the world?

I mean, if agreements for preventing climate change had enough teeth to encourage people to go to war for more land area then that would be impressive.

And yes, at the end of the day I think stopping climate change is more important than "who owns which piece of land", so if countries were struggling that hard to stay under their consumption limits then it could very well be worth some land changing hands.

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