Firstly, the number cited was ~10 times the CO2 output per capita, not ~16.
Secondly, it doesn't follow that GDP production in a primarily high tech, services, IP based economy should track the CO2 behavior of a different sort of economy. It's entirely possible that we're producing far and away more GDP and wasting CO2 production needlessly. (In fact, out GDP multiplier is 1.6 times higher than our CO2 multiplier, hinting that the two are at least partially decoupled.)
I think you might be over estimating how much of the US economy is IP based or high tech.
Google tells me 6.7M people work in tech out of 127M people with a full time job. Roughly 4%? Sure, the GDP per worker is higher, but suffice to say most of the GDP output of the US isn't due to sexy new low CO2 jobs.
My numbers are based around the idea that the US has a 1.6/20.8/77.6 Agriculture/Industry/Services breakdown, while India has a 17/29.7/45 breakdown, and that 40% of the US GDP doesn't seem to depend in any way on things that would produce much CO2 (compared to say, heavy industry) -- real estate (not construction), finance, health care, information, entertainment, corporate governance and education. (That's not counting another 15% unspecified government spending, which likely includes a substantial amount of non-CO2-producing expenses, likely pushing that number up to about 50% GDP.)
Similarly, industry-volume-for-industry-volume, the US should be more efficient in production, meaning that it should use lower CO2 even with the same level of industry.
Which is what we see: the US does use less CO2 to produce more GDP, precisely contrary to what the argument supposes (that they're exactly correlated).
I'm not saying that the US does make poor use of its CO2 emissions, merely that the argument I was responding to failed to show either direction -- the argument it made was fundamentally unrelated.
Ed: To put math on it -- the US is somewhere between about as efficient as India and less efficient than India, depending on how exactly that 40% aligns with actual CO2 production and how closely that 15% aligns with CO2 production. In the case of the 40%, the US is within rounding of not wasteful. In the case of 50%, the US is somewhat less efficient and probably is wasting CO2 production.
The problem with your analysis is that a) it was simply wrong about the numbers, and had a 1:1 CO2:GDP relationship, when the numbers don't bear that out (and hence didn't account for my objection) and b) it supposes a fact about comparing CO2 production to GDP that isn't true, because the composition of economies varies substantially.
I wasn't saying you were wrong. I was saying your argument was bullshit.
Firstly, the number cited was ~10 times the CO2 output per capita, not ~16.
Secondly, it doesn't follow that GDP production in a primarily high tech, services, IP based economy should track the CO2 behavior of a different sort of economy. It's entirely possible that we're producing far and away more GDP and wasting CO2 production needlessly. (In fact, out GDP multiplier is 1.6 times higher than our CO2 multiplier, hinting that the two are at least partially decoupled.)