alcoholic down the street doesn't hurt you if he continues to drink. That's not the case with greenhouse gas emissions.

A recent climate change report which really ratcheted up the alarm bells said that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 or we're basically fucked. So that's a 55% reduction from current levels, and right now, China, India, Russia and Brazil are 40% of global emissions. Good luck getting them to cut their emissions by more than 50% in the next 12 years. I think the BEST case scenario is if we get them to hold their greenhouse emissions flat to current levels. And in that scenario, in order to achieve the 45% global reduction from 2010 levels, everyone else would have to reduce emissions by 90%... in 12 years. And it's worse than that. "Everyone else" includes Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, etc. Good luck getting countries like that to cut their emissions by 50%+. So you're really left with the US, EU, Japan, Korea, Australia, NZ, Canada, to bear the brunt of the reduction. These countries make up roughly 1/3 of global greenhouse emissions. They could all cut emissions to ZERO and we'd still fall short of the reduction target needed to avoid global catastrophe.