Cars aren’t the primary green house gas issue. Animal agriculture and energy are. Plus, America only accounts for about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions.
So even if all of us hedonistic Americans drove tiny little cars the current global warming trend would continue.
You make decent arguments but the fact of the matter is it’s a drop in the bucket.
Transportation accounts for 28% of USA's greenhouse gas emissions. And the point is that instead of increasing your carbon footprint because other sources are greater, you should try to decrease it. Of course there are other issues of equal or greater importance, like mass consumption of cheap stuff manufactured in Asia and transported around the world, but choosing a Ford Explorer instead of a Ford Focus doesn't exactly help.
Literally everything is a drop in the bucket. All those drops have filled the bucket but any time you point one out someone will cry "But thats only x% of the problem"
I actually find it a bit sickening when I hear people like Trump say that they don't want to stop polluting because China is polluting, and increasingly so. China have more than four times as many inhabitants, most of them live nowhere close the same lifestyle as the average or even most of the poorest Americans (or Europeans, I'm not putting all the blame on the US). A lot of western manufacturing is outsourced to countries like China, meaning that some of their pollution is actually ours. We in the west have also had a lot of time building our economy using fossil fuel, so we have a pretty significant climate debt. But the argument "others do it too" isn't a valid argument.
Is it better to look at per capita or per unit of economic growth? One of my central complaints of the Left is that they tend to find the later unimportant whereas for me it's the former that doesn't matter. Per country is not even on the table I think.
> Is it better to look at per capita or per unit of economic growth?
Per capita IMO. Not all economic growth (assuming you're talking about GDP) is created equal, and not all of it is desirable. You can grow the economy both by drilling oil and by installing solar panels, but one of them helps the problem and the other hurts it. If we start pricing carbon externalities into both activities, the panels would make more sense financially.
Economic growth exists to serve people and make lives better - it's not an end in itself. And emissions per capita is an indicator of how carbon-efficient the economy is in providing whatever lifestyle it provides to its participants.
Per country means nothing. We could just subdivide the world in to hundreds more countries and all celebrate how none of us has more than 1% of the global emissions.
Were they advocating for "tiny little cars" or just suggesting something more appropriately sized for a subset of people?
Ideally, people would have easier access to a certain type of car when they needed it, rather than buying that type of car for all activities so they felt prepared.
So even if all of us hedonistic Americans drove tiny little cars the current global warming trend would continue.
You make decent arguments but the fact of the matter is it’s a drop in the bucket.