Mbutt. buttault on Monoculture 6564

Maybe. The point is that Mark's way of looking at it (pollution per capita) is about the most useless possible way to look at it, because (1) pollution is strongly correlated with industrial activity, and (2) the output of most industries can be efficiently shipped nearly anywhere in the world (which means that the population you should be counting a given factory's pollution against is not just the people of the country that the factory is in, but should also include the people of the countries that it exports to).

Population won't correlate very well with industrial output per capita. GDP per capita will at least have a decent positive correlation with industrial output per capita, and so is a tremendous improvement over anything else that has been offered in this thread (and is easy to find).

To really get a decent answer would require looking for each kind of pollution under discussion at what industries contribute the most to that kind of pollution, figuring out each country's share of that kind of pollution for each industry, and their share of that industry, and see if they are above or below their share, and would have to take into account what fraction of their production in that industry is exported.

-- --Tim Smith