I don't get what you're asking. US emissions per capita have been going down considerably since ~2000 without too much prodding or political will. As have Europes. If you look at the chart, there are only three countries with growing per capita emissions and that's China Russia and India, but most dramatically China.
I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place
This is where border adjustments come into play. We can, for example, implement a carbon tax in the US and impose a tariff on goods from other countries depending on their own environmental policies. This serves as a way to put pressure on all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together.
In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seems like the Chinese government is looking toward expanding their existing policies to cover more industries in an attempt to avoid the EU border adjustment).
Another way to look at it is that given how much the USA has already contributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, China would need to continue at their current levels for another 30 or so years before they catch up with us -- and that's with about 4x the population.
I understand that that argument may not be persuasive to some, though, because a lot of the manufacturing and technological development that took place in the USA over that time benefited many countries. And a lot of those emissions took place prior to the wide knowledge of how serious climate change is.
So I'd really say that we should aim for net zero emissions because it's the right thing to do. Everyone has to do it, and it's not going to happen if we all stand around waiting for someone else to go first. There is a pretty massive amount of emissions cutting we could do without much effort at all, and if the rest is spread out over a number of years, the cost will be very small, and will have a lot of benefits to people's health. (Climate change is not the only negative externality of burning fossil fuels by a long shot.)
How does the life of the average human looks like in a world with net zero emissions? How is that life different than subsistence farming?
We need to articulate the future, not wax poetically toward some vague economic abstractions. Unless we can articulate some hopeful answer to this question, nothing consequential will change. People really do not want to live as subsistence farmers.
The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption?
Passive house is a very high standard, and I do not think it is very practical to do it at large scale.
Aiming for something that can be net zero is probably more practical: building stringently up to a certain point, and then throw some PV panels to offset whatever expected energy use is remaining.
Way to cherry pick things and sugar coat the stats for the US.
Per capita emissions for the US: 15.52 tons
Per capita emissions for India: 1.91
US has about eight times the per capita emission of India, double that of China(which makes a lot of things for the US) and somehow India and China are to blame and the US deserves no blame, even given all its riches and having the means to reduce emissions?
I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...