"Not sure why people really care about the so called Green House Gases ................. India, China and a dozen others are going to pump out more CO2 et al than you can poke a stick at..."By way of a simple demonstration of that, consider the following numerical reality:
Over the past 2 decades (less, actually; over the past 17 years), total global carbon emissions have risen by
44%, from 25.7bn tonnes in 2000, to 37.1bn tonnes in 2017 (2017 being the latest year that the EU's Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research has collated data for all countries).
In the developed world (i.e., EU, USA, Canada, Australia) total carbon emissions have
fallen by 12% (from 11.0bn tonnes in 2000, to 9.7bn tonnes in 2017.)
By comparison, emissions from Developing and Undeveloped countries have risen by a
full 86% (no, that's not a typo...it is eighty six percent) from 14.7bn tonnes in 2000 to 27.4bn tonnes in 2017.
Emissions from the Developing world in 2000 were one-third greater than the Developed world.
Less than a decade later, by 2017, they were more than 2.8 times greater.
Today, that proportion is sure to be well over 3 times greater.
And, with per capita carbon emissions in the developing world still only a fraction (about one-tenth) of those in the Developed World, as that per capita figure increases as a consequence of modernisation, industrialisation, and consumption in those countries, at the same time that population in those countries continues to grow, how does any government - which is where you are allocating the responsibility - act in a way to prevent carbon emissions in the developing world from continuing their inexorable rise in the coming decades?
In other words, the nub of the problem is the intractable mathematical reality of:
A
large number (aggregate carbon emissions in the developing and undeveloped world) becoming
exponentiallylarger (exponential because of the additive effect of rising populations and rising per capita emissions), which is outpacing - at an accelerating rate - a
smaller number (aggregate carbon emissions from the developed world) getting
linearlysmaller (linearly because the population is remaining largely constant). ?
This dynamic is possibly better represented graphically by the following scenario in which emissions in the developed world are assumed to reduced by a very significant, and unprecedented, 15% pa over the next 3 decades, to end up being a full 90% lower by 2030 and effectively zero by 2040 (the blue line),...
....while emissions growth in the developing world (the black line) is somehow able to be confined to a mere 2%pa (bearing in mind that the compound annual growth rate of emissions from the developed world rose at a rate of 9.3%pa over the last 17 years, so 2% pa is a patently conservative number):
View attachment 1785164As the red columns in the chart, which are total global carbon emissions, show:
Even if the developed world does amazing job at getting to 90% reduction in emissions by 2030 and zero emissions soon thereafter, it will not stop total global emissions from continuing to rise dramatically (by a full
40% in the scenario considered above).
(And remember, that developing world emission growth figure is assumed at just 2%pa ....which is, effectively, not much different to population growth in the developed world and so does not even account for the inevitable rising
per capita emissions as income levels of those regions of the world rise.)
It is really a numbers game and to pretend otherwise is nothing other than duplicitous.
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