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[quote user="shawnee"] In a global economy, to me it's hard to separate out "rich and free" from others when it comes to "responsibility" for pollution emissions.  After all, we've been steadily outsourcing much of our manufacturing capability to countries such as China, who burn the energy to make us air conditioners, TVs and the like.  If we in the USA manufactured all the stuff we actually use on a daily basis, what would be the emission for our country?  It's the consumer lifestyle that generates the emissions.  Where the stuff is manufactured is just a political arguing point.  Granted, a lot of the countries where manufacturing has fled have lower regulatory supervision on things like pollutants.  But isn't that one reason why manufacturing flees there...along with cheap labor?  Now, not that I'm advocating going back to the stone age, but these national emission arguments seem to me to be a bit facile...albeit a political arguing point.[/quote]It is true that China's contribution to world pollution is partially the result of manufacturing American products.  But I don't think it follows that the same amount of pollution from producing those products would occur if they were made in the U.S. as opposed to China.  On average, China's industrial processes produce more pollution than U.S. industrial processes.You mention that to you, national emission arguments are facile.  To me, they seem really hard.  They are especially difficult because they are wrapped up in subterfuge.The national emission arguments are not born of pride of the richest nations idly boasting that they are the cleanest.  This response is actually the richest nations defending themselves from the world activists' charge that the richest nations are the largest part of the cause of climate destruction because those nations consume more per capita than the poor nations.  While that is generally true, the activists continue the charge by saying that the richest nations also pollute more than the poorer nations.  That is generally true if you compare the emissions of whole nation totals, and if you consider CO2 to be pollution.  However, on a per capita basis, I think you will find that, on average, poorer nations pollute far more per capita than the richer nations.  And if you take CO2 out of the equation, the richest nations are even cleaner.  So the fact that the rich countries consume more per capita is somewhat of a red herring to the blame-for-climate-change argument.  This poses some questions:  Is it fair to compare the emissions amounts of whole nations and assign blame accordingly?  The U.S. produces far more emissions than Cuba, so does that mean that Cuba is less of a problem than the U.S.?  Or do we need to compare the per capita emissions of the two countries to make it fair?  Climate activists assign blame according to national total emissions, which leads to the conclusion that the U.S. is the largest perpetrator of climate destruction.  By labeling CO2 as a pollutant, they are able to make the U.S. into an even greater perpetrator.  This leads to another question:  Do climate activists target the richest nations because their emission totals are the highest, or do they target the richest nations because they are rich?  Climate activists represent the world as one big community, where rich nations are less virtuous than poor nations based on national emissions.  At this point in the argument, they do acknowledge the greater per capita pollution of the poorer countries, and use it to establish NEED.  At the same time, they look at the greater per capita consumption and greater national emission total of the richest countries, and use it to establish EXCESS.  From here, they seek to level that disparity of emission virtuosity, as they have defined it, by financially penalizing the rich countries for their excess, and using the funds to help poor countries with their need to reduce their pollution.  It amounts to taking from the rich and giving it to the poor through a carbon credit trading system.   Fundamentally, there are two beneficiaries in the redistribution of wealth.  One is the recipient of the redistribution, and the other is the redistributor.  In this case, that would be the U.N. with their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the heart and soul of climate activism.  The dream of administering a worldwide program of carbon credit trading in the name of preventing the destruction of the planet is a major aspiration of the U.N.  And it reveals the motive behind their targeting the richest nations as the most blameworthy.
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