alt Hacker News> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.