If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
China and India would like a word with you
But even so, in the future it'll be small consolation to think "nothing to be done, someone else was worse"
“Why per capita?” - many people have an innate desire for ‘fairness’ and assigning some degree of accountability (or expectation of impact of mitigating changes) based 1-1 per person, appeals to that. It also bypasses thinking about the larger overall problem, while giving a degree of apparent control to them as individuals. And let’s them blame other individual for the problem if it doesn’t get fixed.
“Why per country?” - because anyone trying to actually accomplish anything realizes that issues of this scale are not really resolvable through individuals making decisions against their incentives, but at best national policy making - but really international treaties to change incentives. The atmosphere is the largest ‘commons’ we have, except perhaps the oceans.
Perhaps not even then. Since every country has an incentive to avoid actual accountability for their own actions, while pawning off the consequences onto someone else, and managing that type of situation typically requires an overarching authority. And no sovereign (for good reasons!) wants to bend the knee to a foreign power. And any international authority is necessarily going to be foreign to everyone to some extent.
So attempting to assign accountability at the coarsest level of sovereign control on that front feels most actionable.
Really I expect things will get much worse until individual countries start doing emergency geo-engineering to attempt to stop widespread famine, out of control flooding, or lethal heat waves, making it worse for some, better for others but rather randomly.
I’m honestly surprised India hasn’t already started. I’m guessing within the next decade or two.
This will lead to other countries starting wars with them to attempt to control such behavior, until some sort of international accords can be worked out - where the rich countries will prosper, and the poor countries will be fucked. As usual.
But people call me an Optimist. You don’t want to hear what I say when I’m being cynical.
It would be good to have a graph showing where the ultimate products of these emissions ended up.
You will notice that the picture does not change radically if you include emissions from trade (which is what you were asking).
Turns out while China expects a lot of stuff to the us, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on net emissions.
China’s population is 4x times the US, and still, total emissions are a little over 2x — and that’s ignoring the outsized impact from exported goods.