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CO2/capita numbers matter from an assigning blame point of view, but physics doesn't care if a ton of CO2 is emitted by one person or ten people.

It's a bad argument to do nothing, but it's also not completely wrong. At this point we could turn off Europe and the USA and would still blow past 800ppm CO2 by 2100.

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Would it work that way? A non-trivial portion of the emissions of those countries are caused by manufacturing products that are exported to the US and Europe

It would have some follow-on effect for a while due to shrinking the global economy but over time domestic demand in these countries and other places would pick up the slack.

But they can't pickup the slack if they are turned off. The east should not take the blame for emissions, when the majority of it is the proxy emission for the western consumption.

I meant the East would scale up consumption. The Chinese want cars and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners too, and I’m pretty bullish on air conditioning in India.

I think we overestimate how much is proxy emissions even now. Those are whole modern growing societies not just factories for us. Our view of climate change and carbon emission tends to be, like other things, very Euro-and-US centric and provincial.

What I’m saying is that if you turned us off you’d only delay the oncoming train, not stop it.

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