>The great majority of the world's population lives in countries with per capita emissions less than a third of the US's
So what? Emissions are global and rising especially in the places where most people live (Asia). If emission of the whole USA would be zero from today on, global emission would keep growing. At the current rate it would only take a few years for the rest of the world additional emission to replace the whole USA.
Needless to to say that zero emission is only a thought experiment. But if this better-than-best-case-scenario can only buy us 10 years or so maybe we should not focus on this?
If the average human causes half the emission of the US people then that is still more than the planet can sustain so why do we focus on the small portion of people who use the most? We should focus on finding a solutions that cuts emission for all. Its not hard to figure out that cutting emissions from all people in halve would have far more benefit than bring the US peoples emission down to the world average or even lower. It intuitively makes sense to reduce emission where it seems the highest but if you look a the whole picture it will not have the desired effect.
>It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post. The whole green movement is about cutting emission at all cost. Regardless of the fact that removing hummers from Americans or even all cars that use above average fuel would do absolutely nothing on a global scale. Especially not if they have to be replaced by newly build cars.
The whole ideas that us middle-class and rich people who could afford to reduce their emissions should be the once who take the cut is completely absurd. Yes they probably could but would probably crash the global economy if they did and beside that it would not matter at all. The global emissions are not cased by luxury products and people with high emission hobbies like driving a sport car.
> Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels.....surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.
It would takes 20-30 years and it would cause and insane amount of emissions to produce solar panels and batteries in these quantities that it would reduce significant emissions. In the same time the rest of the worlds additional emissions would at least double what the USA would reduce. especially if most of the electronics that the USA would need is produces somewhere else and the processing steps that case the most emissions would likely be done outside of the USA.
The reality is we dont know how to reduce global emissions in a significant way (unless you include "solutions" that would directly or indirectly cause the death of millions of people or otherwise would be ethically not okay). We waste time by doing green placebo-solutions rather than putting all the resources we still have into finding real solutions.