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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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