Greenhouse gas emissions and the developing world

During the recent debates about greenhouse gases statements have been made about not making an effort on greenhouse gases before large emitters like China and India make some effort.

Of course, China and India are large greenhouse emitters because they are large countries, each with around a billion inhabitants. This is largely due to arbitrary political boundaries, if we look at the India State of Kerala (just as valid a unit of analysis) we would get a different picture for its 31m inhabitants.

Thus the best thing to do is look at emissions per person. Any sensible global scheme for stabilising the emission of greenhouse gases would involve a standard emission target per person across the world. Any alternative, such as allowing US citizens higher emissions than allowed in India or China would be a pretty hard argument to put forward.

So in this context how does the argument that we should not take any action before India and China do stack up?

Information on emissions per person is available on this Wikipedia page.

The data a bit old, from 2000, but serves the purpose.

The emissions for Australia are 25.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person, for the United States it is 22.9 tonnes per person.

In China 3.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person and in India it is 1.8 tonnes.

China and India are way below developed countries levels of emissions.

The emission reductions required in the developed world are so far in advance of what the developing countries need to achieve. We need to get started way before them if we are going to achieve our objective, and it is not necessary or practicable to wait for them before undertaken to reduce developed world emission.

BONUS POINT:

My understanding of the global warming issue is that it a very significant environmental disaster confronting us. The whole “waiting for India and China” negotiating strategy must by definition be based around an argument that if agreement is not reached we will just abandon attempts to reduce emissions and let global warming occur. This “waiting” argument seems to equate global warming more with an argument about whether to go down to the shops to get some milk, rather than a massive environmental disaster where if we all don’t start bailing soon the entire ship is going to sink. In that circumstance it is not in the best interest of anyone to sit around saying “you start bailing first”, “no you!” Just grab a bucket and get at it!