The false argument of ‘per capita emissions’
While watching the ABC’s excellent Insiders last Sunday morning the discussion turned to emissions trading, no surprise there, which included a tte—tte between Andrew Bolt and Malcom Farr, supported by Karen Middleton, on the relevance of per capita emissions.
I’ve been meaning to address the false issue of per capita emissions, aka carbon footprint, for a little while and the show was a reminder to do so.
Politically motivated
The main point to make about ‘per capita emissions’ is that it is a politically motivated term brought to prominence by activist groups in order to corral the discussion about emissions within a framework that only includes the developed world.
Thus, Australia is seen as an ‘international pariah’ by the Climate Faithful because we have high per capita emissions.
The fact that China and India are much greater emitters of CO2 than we are is deliberately ignored by the left, which relies on the argument that those nations should be excused from reducing their emissions, as they weren’t the ones who created the problem in the first place and they need time to advance their economies.
As I pointed out recently, the only reason that these countries need to advance is that they had fifty or so years of socialist handbrake on their economies and have only relatively recently introduced the market reforms that have propelled them into their current high growth phases, which has seen around two hundred million people pulled out of near-poverty and into an emerging middle class.
The other point is that both China and India (and to a lesser extent other emerging economies such as Brazil) are now in a position to take advantage of a lifestyle that includes technologies and products that they had no role in creating.
Thus, it can be philosophically argued that these countries ‘owe’ the West a catch up amount to cover the development cost of these technologies.