And then there is the World political issue: China's position has always been that the present CO2 levels are what it took for the West to rise to wealth. The Chinese et al will never accept arguments that effectively require that they should forever remain poor. Who would? The combined population of China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is
3.1 billion, while the combined population of the US and the EU is
0.84 billion. The corresponding figures for GDP is $15.4 Trillion for China et al, and $38.2 Trillion for US+EU (including UK). The per capita income (GDP divided by population) is nine time higher in the US+EU than in China et al, so for everyone to have the same per-capita income, China et al must increase their economic activity level by a factor of nine per capita, with almost four times the population, for a net factor of 4*9 = 36.
In modern industrial economies, where fossil fuels replace human and animal muscle in powering industry, economic activity is generally proportional to energy use. Now, modern technology is far more efficient than a century ago, but still a large factor increase in energy demand is required for the developing world to become as rich as the developed world.
The overall scale of economic development for the East to achieve the per-capita wealth of the West is thus (3.1/0.84)*(9)= 33.2 to one, call it 30:1. Said another way, the West governs only 1/(33.2+1)=
2.9% of the global story.
China et al are powered mainly by burning coal, as it's by far the cheapest source that is workable and reliable at the needed scale.
It matters little what the West does, if the East does not do at least thirty times as much. The West is basically a roundoff error here.
Joe Gwinn
Prolog: I developed the Climate Remediation Engineering largely in
2019 as a part of climate debates in the AAAS (publisher of Science magazine). It was all about the big climate models and their correctness, which is impossible for any civilian to assess, but being an engineer I went straight to the engineering. JMG