If they aren't willing to pull their weight, anything we do will be just a drop in the bucket anyway.
So there's really no point in Canada, the US, and Australia supporting it.
Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean turns it up for us with this chart :
Data collected by the US Dept of Energy. Map from Wiki.
Update : The above graph and map are 'per capita' - divide the total emissions per country by the number of people producing it to get an individual's footprint.
A 'per capita' perspective has the advantage of showing that this is also a social justice issue.
If an individual guy in China or India uses in a year the same energy one of us North Americans blows through in an afternoon, then we are not in a position to get too high horsey about demanding that he cut down his meager energy consumption as a precondition for our doing so.
Make sense?
14 comments:
Oooooh Wikipedia...woo woo!
Actually it's the U.S. Department of Energy - Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center...woo woo.
I completely agree we need to cut down, but that chart is pretty misleading, given that it's per capita output. More accurately, I'd like to see that compared with a chart showing actual output.
Ouch, thanks for that one C-Side! I actually quoted that piece of crap about China doing 80% of the greenhouse emissions to somebody because I'd, uh, read it in the Globe and Mail on Saturday. Hey, I'm not usually this stupd, but everyone is now talking global warming and it isn't that easy to bypass those assumptions that the deniers interjected into the debate without softpedaling into some form of agreement.
Maybe I'm just part of that 90% of the Canadian pop. that believes in the scientists without doing the rigorous research that they (and you) do. Does that make me dumb? I don't think so; just intentionally ill-informed.
If I had it- $10,000 to anyone who could give me a succcinct 10 pt rebuttal to the XXXON sponsored bulls**t. Because it's vital now: everyone is aware and talking and sadly mis-informed. But for how long?
Anyone remember the novel "The Sheep look Up"?
I guess I'm one of those people who are misinformed then because I don't get it. What does a per capita output chart prove when India and China are going to surpass us in emissions within just a few years?
Sinblox, M@ry :
It's not a refutation of existing data - it's just using the same data to make a different point.
I'll do an update to clarify.
B boy :
It's complicated and we're all just catching up. I'm going with the scientists too - just not the Exxon ones.
Haven't read the G&B article or "The Sheep Look Up".
Googling....
Is there a way to figure out how many Chinese, or Indian, in-situ residents it would take to equal the energy usage of one Canadian in-situ resident? Approximately?
We never seem to realize that we're among the elite wealthy of the world.
Niles : Ecological footprint per person by country 2003
Figure 18 on page 14 if I pooched the bookmark.
It's a pdf I'm afraid.
Also from page 18 of the report:
"This means that it took approximately a year and three months for the Earth to produce the ecological resources we used in that year."
Even if my mad math skillz ain't what they used to be, that's grim news, and according to the report, the situation is not improving
Sorry, meant "page 14"
It took about 10 years for China and India to join the Montreal Protocols on CFC emissions. Experience says the same thing would happen on carbon emissions. Besides which, both countries have a lot of low hanging fruit to harvest by introducing more efficiency.
I remember "The Sheep Look Up". Brunner must have been going through a depressed period or something, because it was uncompromisingly bleak. Unrelenting, too, like getting kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Saying any more would involve spoilers, but it's definitely worth the read. One of his best.
Thanks kindly for the reference, Ms. Alison.
B-boy : How to talk to a global warming skeptic
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