Per capita is such a messy measurement. China manufactures goods for the entire world. The United States grows food for the entire world. The people in each country aren't simply driving the emissions and enjoying the fruits of it.
It’s important to contextualize for sure. Perhaps the numbers could be fudged by including imports in per-capita calculations, but you run into cycles because ultimately the world is interconnected. CO2 is mostly fungible anyways, so we should clean up everywhere we can.
Definitely harder to measure, but I think this is the basic premise of John Michael Greer's Wealth of Nature [1]: that what we refer to as the "primary" economy—resource extraction industries like mining, farming, and so on—are in fact secondary to the true primary economy of purely natural systems upon which those industries rest, and if we can devise means of valuing and pricing the contribution of that true primary economy, then we'll be much better positioned not to treat those resources (including things like the ability of it to absorb pollution) as bottomless.
On the one hand, it's carbon pricing ++, but I think it's quite a holistic way of looking at the matter, since it's also trying to consider the multitude of other ways that poor stewardship of the natural world ultimately impacts the survivability of the planet, in terms of things like over-fishing, deforestation leading to soil erosion, irresponsible pesticide use leading to monocultures, etc etc.
Corporations promoted offshoring/outsourcing specifically to move their most pollutant/dangerous processes to the developing world — out of reach from the threat of western democracy and it’s environmental/labor regulations.
Using per capita production is a whataboutism psychological warfare tactic to derail climate/emissions discussions and point the finger at China etc, even though the developed world has always been responsible for the majority of the demand, and “embodied” energy/emissions.
I'd expect developing countries to massive increase emissions first as they capitalize. Reason why PRC uses more concrete in 3 years than US uses in last 100 apart from PRC being massive is because US/west emissions from capital/construction (30% of total) is spread out over time. All the developing countries are going to be pouring tons of concrete as they grow. Some emissions can be mitigated from production end but a lot of the dirtier stuff is unavoidable.
Id argue that's exactly why we should look at per capita data, otherwise people and companies from smaller countries look at the data and throw their hands up in the air and do nothing because (some big country) dwarfs the numbers from where they are.
A factory pumping out N units of c02 should be trying/incentivised to cut c02 emissions regardless of whether they're in the United States or in Niue. Per capita emissions data gives us a much better idea of where those factories might be than data that doesn't take population into account.
I want to make this perfectly clear: The Canadian people are not responsible for the per-capita emissions of the country; we have no control over it and there's nothing citizens can do to reduce our footprint.
Canada's high emissions per-capita are a combination of its disproportionately large industry, 2nd largest landmass in the world, a large part of the country being a frozen wasteland, and its miniscule population.
Per-capita is useless in practice because a factory pumping out 1000000 units in Canada will look bad per-capita.
A factory pumping 1000000 units in China looks great per-capita.
It's not a fair comparison at all and if Canada was 0.0 emissions per-capita it would make 0 difference in the world because China outputs the equivalent to a Canada in a short time frame.
Canada's energy is the cleanest in the entire world by a massive margin. Ontario is 100% non-emitting energy. Canada never gets any credit for any of this, ever, while European countries still buying natural gas from Russia are lauded as trailblazers in clean energy.
Canada does far far more than its fair share for the rest of the world and it doesn't deserve to be singled out due to an idiotic statistic that is only useful for comparing local phenomenons.
> A factory pumping 1000000 units in China looks great per-capita.
A country with a relatively small population and little heavy industry looks great in absolute figures.
> we have no control over it and there's nothing citizens can do to reduce our footprint.
Didn't know Canada had entirely electrified transport.
> Canada does far far more than its fair share
The fair share is net negative carbon emissions for every country and an increasing amount of wilderness across all biomes. A group of polities which are the greatest environmental vandals in all human history is an incredibly low bar against which to measure achievement.
Decarbonising the economy requires investment. Canada is one of the richest nations in the world.
> Per-capita is useless in practice because a factory pumping out 1000000 units in Canada will look bad per-capita.
> A factory pumping 1000000 units in China looks great per-capita.
A factory pumping out 1000000 units, each earning $1k, will net each Canadian $26.
The same factory in China will net each Chinese citizen 71 cents.
You think you found the unfairness of the comparison, but in essence, you're just saying "But Canada is rich and China is poor! That's why Canadians get to pollute more than Chinese per capita!"
Your argument isn't going to persuade many people.
> We have no control over it and there's nothing citizens can do to reduce our footprint.
That's just not true. You can buy cars with better fuel efficiency. (Just say no to SUV.) You can buy electric cars. You can avoid air travel. You can vote for better public transportation policy, so more people take trains not cars. These are big items and they matter.
You're mixing energy and electricity, not the same thing. There's still plenty of oil being burnt by transport among others Canada also has the disporportionate levels of consumption typical to the West, no praise there.
Or.. country could just ignore the data. I think the only solution is for the rich country to pay the poor countries to decrease their usage proportional to the expected decrease. Not arguing if it is fair or not, but likely the only thing that could work.
Which, to put in perspective, is 25% higher than the UK (industrial revolution starter and all that) has ever been. The EU-27 average is lower still, but not every country had its peak at the same time so that makes sense.
Today's "leaders" are oil states like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, followed on the heels by Australia, the USA, and... Mongolia? Because of the low population density, they got a lot of individual house's heating or why?
> Which, to put in perspective, is 25% higher than the UK (industrial revolution starter and all that)
What do you mean to suggest by "industrial revolution starter and all that"? I would not expect emissions at the very beginning of the industrial revolution to hold a candle to peak industrialization. Being the first to industrialize seems entirely irrelevant.
Air conditioners are actually remarkably efficient at what they do, doubly so if used for heating as well. Washing machines are also a lot more efficient than the alternative, that being people manually washing clothes. And commercial airlines don't emit THAT much per capita since most people don't fly all that often.
What the US had during WWI was a lot of domestic manufacturing which is now outsourced and the replacement CO2 emitters are probably mostly cars and animal farming.
No. What US did is decarbonization and energy efficiency improvement. Trade-adjusted emission, taking into account of manufacturing outsourcing, is also decreasing, since 2005.
Being as good as WW1 is a positive because the USA's emission peak was quite a lot higher still in the 1970s (per capita), I don't think this was criticism necessarily.
What surprised me, what I didn't know, is that the USA has been one of the highest for so long actually, starting to be worse than what most of the EU is today (~10t CO2e/capita/year) already in ~1903 and remaining that way even during the great depression. Being back to 1915 levels is not that bad with that kind of history (of course, until the ~1990s at the earliest, nobody knew this was an issue so no blame/fault for that era).
Just from eyeballing the dates on the chart, I’m guessing a lot of those extra emissions are due to the oil industry and the long history of production within the United States. The US was the number one producer for a while, never really fell that far behind Russia or Saudi Arabia, and became (and I believe is still) the top producer again.
The big picture is that world population is leveling off at 9-10 billion and emissions per capita will eventually level off and then go down, so total emissions is not on some kind of runaway exponential curve.
I'm having trouble squaring this data showing US emissions going down with the ever increasing consumption I see all around me in everyday life. I just don't buy it at face value.
>I'm having trouble squaring this data showing US emissions going down with the ever increasing consumption I see all around me in everyday life.
You're assuming that individual consumption is the primary source of emissions, instead of relatively invisible-to-the-consumer industrial processes. Which is understandable, because BP, Exxon etc have all poured billions of dollars into creating that misconception, into convincing everyone that to solve climate change, the average consumer must research how much coal was burned to produce that Twix before they buy it.
In practice, the carbon emissions of any particular good can vary wildly, and are quite opaque (by design, as no corporation wants to advertise their shortcomings in support of a "buy less stuff!" movement).
Transportation is 28%, and industry is 23%. US in fact drives larger cars like SUV and cars with worse fuel efficiency. This is directly reflected in higher per capita emission of US compared to Europe.
Your opinion and observations are not facts. Either global warming is real because the data shows it or you are ignoring the data with your own bias. Pick one.
Interesting how US emissions started falling around/post GFC when residential construction collapsed and have yet to recover. Us new house starts around ~60% of mid 2000s high, while piling on 40m to population. I wonder how much that contributed. I think 2/3 of US building stock is SFHs while construction accounts for than 1/3 of emissions and I think there's 6-7 million units of housing shortage from last decade of underbuilding.
There are about 1,000 billionaires in the US. If they emit a thousand times more CO2 than an average person they would equal a million people. There are about 334 million non-billionaires in the US. Not enough billionaires to realistically skew these numbers.
What an ofd way to present data. The colors are per capita, but the presentation is by country, i.e. area, so it looks like half the worlds emissions are produced by just Russia and Canada.
One reason for Canada is the use of a lot of energy to heat buildings in the winter. Canada has a lot of hydro power in British Columbia and Quebec, but the prairie provinces don't and use natural gas instead.
Incredible to post this in a year with record numbers of forest fires. When trees burn they release all their sequestered carbon. Climate change makes forest fires more common.
Regardless planting trees is still a good thing and I don't actually know of any liberals who are against it, very strange thing to believe of them.
You are making up traits about liberals. Isn't this the same group Republicans call "tree huggers"? You're so overly aggressive--you'll never convince your opposition that you're actually correct when you're being a giant asshole.
Fair enough. "The planet doesn't care" was meant as short hand for "in order to maintain the goldilocks climate balance under which human civilization has flourished since the last ice age 10k years ago"
yeah well then america and europe should be building stuff for free everywhere else. you're not going to convince the poor to worry about the future by pulling up the ladder behind you
