Whether you believe in AGW or not, saying that a developed country is more responsible for global warming because the per capita rate is higher, is total shit. Why do you figure the US and developed nations use more energy? It's because we have big houses, lights, refrigeration, air conditioning, vehicles, and not to mention Northern latitudes which requires heating during the winter. All these things are marks of a higher standard of living.
The SJW complain about the low standard of living in these poor "undeveloped" nations, without realizing that if their standard of living improves, so will their per capita carbon emissions. But there's more to the story, some countries such as China and India have displayed willful resistance to improving their standard of living, preferring instead to employ a strategy of a slave-labour class of workers who live in bunks outside their factory and work 6 days a week. They will never have the kind of carbon output per capita that we do, and the SJW by praising their lower emissions without looking at the big picture are in effect praising their reduced standard of living, which btw is done to help keep the ruling class wealthy in comparison to the rest of the country, and the country wealthy in comparison to the rest of the world.
But wait, there's more. Judging a nation's emission by per-capita use (without considering standard of living), also completely ignores the idea that the world doesn't care how many people it took to make that pollution. It's like saying, "If only the US had triple the amount of people and everyone's standard of living went down by 2/3 we would be helping the environment so much". The world only cares about gross pollution. The physical size of the US compared to the physical size of China, is almost identical. China creates over double the pollution of the US on the same area of land. If we use a flawed rule based on some arbitrary number of people living in an area, it creates a massive loophole in the climate initiatives to increase pollution and GDP with increased population, while incentivizing a decreased standard of living. No one forces a country to have so many people, that's their own choice and economic strategy. It's completely independent of the Gross Pollution in the world, which is the only figure that matters.
"But but... we had our industrial revolution over a hundred years ago, and the rest of the world is so far behind. It's not fair to make a rule now. It's unethical for us to stop them from polluting."
This argument is horseshit on a number of levels. Hey, we ended slavery over a hundred years ago too, I guess we should allow the rest of the world to keep slavery because "they haven't caught up yet". But here's the real kicker, the total pollution produced during the industrial revolution is a fraction of the pollution being produced today. From 1750 to 1950, 200 years of global CO2 emissions are about 1/10 of the emissions from 1950 - 2015. This means 2 thing, first it doesn't help for someone to "catch up", it's just a race to use more and more fossil fuels. If anything we should be slowing down the development of other countries until advances in clean energy have been made. Secondly, it means we can't allow "developing" nations like India and China to cause high levels of pollution in pursuit of "development", when actual development of industry in the west caused relatively very few carbon emissions.
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[–] JohnPaulJones 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
..... it's all self contradictory bull shit. At no point was any of this ever about the environment.