In emissions there is just China and then the US as a somewhat distant second. But to be honest the whole world is using China as their factory.

Europe and India are the regions that are actually surprisingly negligible. Africa and the rest of the developing world doesn't make a blip.

You need to account for indirect emissions. Because all the factories are in China means that China emits more, but those iPads are not being sold and used in China.

When you import goods, you import their emissions. It's just super hard to measure (and we like to blame it all on China).

The solution there is to create tariffs based on emissions so that the costs of the emissions get accounted when people import goods.

I don't understand the word "tarries", somehow even after looking it up :-). (Not my first language, sorry)

I meant that in practice it's very difficult to track, because it involves a lot of actors in a lot of countries.

This is irrelevant for looking at the effectiveness of climate policy. Restrictions on emissions in the US and EU are not going to reduce the emissions from factories in China even if the resulting products are sold in the US/EU.

How do you mean that? China would not produce iPads for the rest of the world if the rest of the world was not buying iPads, right?

The graal of climate policy would actually be to be able to know precisely the impact of every single action we do. So that we could optimize properly. But because we can't do that, we have to rely on proxies, and that makes it error prone and practically very challenging.

US is not negligible. They are number 1 per capita.

China just had an astronomically high population. They will always be higher overall due to this.

An actual measurement of this needs to be performed capita.

Trump is going to reduce the USA's proxy-emissions in China if he pulls through on tariffs at least I guess.

If prices go up Americans will buy less.

No, the reverse. Tariffs Trump style mean that final goods get imported not intermediate so production moves away especially for the global market.

If the issue is emissions per capita then the solution is simply to increase the population faster than the increase in emissions.

Similar, countries with aging population will see an increase in emissions per capita regardless if they are actually decreasing emissions, as long the population loss is greater than emissions decreases.

If the tariffs are as agressive as promised china may drop its emissions? I don’t know what hope to hold onto anymore.

God, this stupid tariff thing again. All tariffs are going to do is raise costs, so we'll go back to inflation being insane.

I think you might be in agreement with the parent. Increased costs (due to tariffs) will reduce consumption and therefore emissions.

It will just make solar more expensive and increase the attractiveness of US oil and gas to the US electorate further entrenching Trumpism.

We currently have a lot of tariffs. Should we remove all of them, some of them, or do we have exactly the correct amount?

And if the economy starts to turn (or maybe even if it doesn’t) say good by to the relatively apolitical Fed and rate-setting. Which’ll bring a boom, more inflation, and a hard crash on the other side.

Or maybe people stop buying crap they cannot afford

What are you talking about? The US has the 2nd heighest emissions behind China, almost double India's. The only countries higher than it per-capita are Canada, Australia and petro-states or tiny countries.

And China is already leading the world in moving to renewable technology, they are moving in the right direction (not entirely for altruistic reasons - it fulfils their ambitions of energy self-sufficiency).

Another example of Democrats being really poor communicators on specific important issues—they could easily frame renewables as a protectionist issue and make it relevant but instead they don't know how to talk about it so they just avoid it whenever possible.

I do wonder whether democrats will shift to post-conservative messaging. "Let's preserve what we have left of our beautiful American forests" might be able to resonate. Idk.

That exact message has been tried and energy independence/stick-it-to-OPEC remains fairly common way of trying to sell it. Actual measures to onshore renewable industry were successfully demonized as corrupt, didn’t go over well.

Why cherry-pick per-capita when what matters to the climate is actual output, not output per capita. Lets take Australia, as an example, their total co2 output is around 1% of the world's co2 output. If Australia ceased producing all of its co2, it wouldn't make much difference at all. Per capita figures are just a waste of everyone's time.

As someone from a smallish country (UK), I don't think I agree. Per capita is the only-) way of measuring emmissions that doesn't wind up a proxy for just listing the biggest countries.

Almost 1/5 people are in China, if tomorrow the country divided itself up into smaller nations would thay change anything about the pollution bring emmited?

I always try to convince people the best metric is CO2/land area. It actually adjusts for the size of your country without the silly idea that having more people means your country is doing "better" from an emissions perspective.

Great, let's just move everyone to Australia! Or wait...

Unless you have policy recommendations to change the total number of people on Earth (please don't) then global emissions per capita are the only stat that matters.

Per-capita is a hint to the capacity of reduction or a measurement of the inefficiencies of a country.