There are many things that need to be considered take Australia a lot of graphs have us high because they factor in the exports of products like gas and coal not at the point of use but the country of origin so all the greenhouse emissions from Australian exported fuels  are added to Australia's total ,now there is a 20 billion dollar project to deliver solar energy from the Northern Territory in Australia to Singapore via undersea cable on the table this would cut into Singapore's reliance on gas it would be interesting if this would count toward Australia or Singapore , Australia's argument is the demand is from India and without it we would not be exporting the coal so they should have it counted since they control the rate of consumption,my take is both the supplier and consumer should be counted the world is a finite space shared by us all.

one more thought when it comes to renewables taking the Singapore project as an example. if it happens only the amount of reduction should count if it is all used up in increased demand then it should be seen as neutral.

The thing that worries me is loopholes and semantics that tend to crop up in these global problem, i remember reading about proposed carbon credit scheme years ago where a manufacturer could buy credits to offset their carbon, and this was seen to help drive down carbon but it had loopholes like Volkswagen could offset its porsche division without making any changes to its porsches because the system gave an average carbon number for the industry rather than brands  and Volkswagen could use credits from existing cars that came in under that average to offset the carbon used by its sports cars rather than needing to reduce carbon reduction to gain those credits.

Just seems like moving the goal posts. The average footprint of euro countries may be higher, but these are countries with populations that are a fraction of China. China still has an addiction to using coal for energy. Total pollution per country is imo the most important factor as how much a society breeds is definitely part of the problem. Each life consists of several decades of consuming resources.

So ultimately, Europe is actually more environmentally conscious for the simple reason they don’t breed like rabbits ;)

Switch to digital delivery of games. The resulting savings of packaging, production, transportation, heating, cooling, and lighting of the retail store, and the like will offset a shitload gaming related environmental destruction.

But, anyway, essentially everything, as others have mentioned, causes some amount of environmental degradation. Gaming isn't even a blip on the radar of offenders.

There is no reasonable way to discuss pollution on a per country, per capita, or per anything basis. I'm not going to repeat what everyone has said above, but it just can't reasonably be determined that way. It also just doesn't fucking matter (except maybe when talking about something like litter, or solid waste). What matters with greenhouse gases, water pollution, and the like, in the big picture, is the total amount created on earth. All this comparing of industries and countries to each other, creating offsets, and other stuff like that is just nonsense political bullshit. Either the total amount comes down, or it does not.

Not sure where you get you antiquated information from but neither is China. China's population growth is 0.6%, Europe 0.3%, USA 0.7%
South Sudan is the highest atm with 3.83% (Africa is where the current population 'boom' is)

The average European consumes 4000 kwh electricity a year, same as for China.
The average European consumes 80kg of meat a year, the average Chinese 55kg.

Btw, coal isn't necessarily worse than other fossil fuels, plus they need all that power to make our toys...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/15/15634538/china-coal-cleaner 

Europe a fraction of China, there's 741 million people in Europe!

Yes lets compare 1B population country with the size bigger than Europe, to individual countries total that would have 5% population or size, makes total sense

That’s kinda my point. I say keep it simple, have a list of worst offender countries and try to moderate their output. 

Yep I would say that no matter how much you game hardly would have a higher impact than the production of the console itself

And them demand China to achieve some unreal metric that would make it pollute similar to England let's say?

Per capita would be something reasonable, or we can just break China into 50 different states and them see how they compare to European countries.

Doesn't make any sense to stop gaming and watching TV instead, or surf the web.

You can be more conscious about your carbon usage, but it's not simple like stop doing something.

It's like let's ban straws, but keep delivering milk and coke on plastic bottles. Why can't we go back to glass bottles? It wasn't long ago when I was buying glass bottles of Coke.

Or those who eat vegan for the environment, but buy brand new shining Nike shoes every 3 months after throwing the used ones away. Shouldn't we all go back to those good black leather shoes that last ten years?