> In the mean while, the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing.
India!?
India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita.
China is twice the total as the US but about half per capita.
Africa was way lower than the US both in total and per capita.
And yes, per capita is the correct comparison, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.
Let C be the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year that the world as a whole can produce to keep the climate within acceptable parameters.
We do not have a one world government, so staying under C requires a per country approach, probably some sort of quota system. The question then is how to determine each country's share of C.
One approach is simply allocate each country C/N where N is the number of countries. This approach fails because if country X splits up into multiple separate countries, with no change in any greenhouse gas related activities of anyone who was in X, the quota for every other country goes down. In fact, the new countries that were formerly part of X might all actually be able to shift toward more greenhouse gas production.
Example. Let us say C = 10000, N = 200. Then each country has a quote of 50. The US finds it hard to limit itself to 50, having say 5 states that each on their own produce 30. Solution: turn each US state into a separate country, tied together in an EU like web of treaties so that life doesn't actually change much for the people living in those new 50 countries. Now N = 249, quota drops to 40.16 per country, and now those 5 countries that were once problematical at 30 each have quotes of 40.16 and are OK. The American Union as a whole would have a quote of 2008, and many of the new countries could now actually switch to heavier use of fossil fuels.
It goes the other way too. If Russia for example was able to reform the Soviet Union and get back all its former components, everyone other country would see their quota go up around 7%.
To fix this you have to abandon the idea of the quota being equal per country. The quota needs to be per person. Then all that changes when you redraw your maps and the US becomes the American Union or the Soviet Union reforms is who is in charge of enforcing the quota on a given group of people--the amount of emissions allowed by that given group does not change.