This is the sort of political image of CO2 emissions that you usually see presented. The Big Bad USA and Australia get most of the blame for CO2 emissions.
Image above from myclimatechange.net. Note that the artist could not have picked a worse image to portray the message since CO2 is heavier than air and in the real world, none of those balloons would float. Most people learn this in grade school. Even so, lighter than air CO2 balloons seem to be a recurring theme in warmland.
I ran across this interesting tidbit on CO2 emissions per capita which I found interesting. While many warmist organizations concentrate on pushing lifestyle changes related to CO2 emissions, we usually see that framed in reference to total CO2 emissions per country. When you look at the per capita values, an entirely different picture emerges.
LIST OF COUNTRIES RANKED BY 2006 TOTAL CO2 EMISSIONS FROM FOSSIL-FUEL
DATA : Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2008. Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions.
In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview.html
(UNIT : Tons of CO2 per capita)
COUNTRY TONS OF CO2 PER CAPITA
Qatar 49.26
Kuwait 34.22
United-Arab-Emirates 32.94
Bahrain 28.62
Luxembourg 23.89
USA 18.95
Australia 17.93
Canada 16.65
Oman 16.03
Saudi-Arabia 16.03
Estonia 13.02
Finland 12.62
Kazakhstan 12.62
Singapore 12.51
Taiwan 11.93
Czech-Republic 11.16
Russia 10.94
Ireland 10.32
Netherlands 10.28
Japan 10.24
Belgium 10.17
Greenland 9.99
Israel 9.99
Denmark 9.91
South-Korea 9.8
Germany 9.77
Nor-ssb 9.59
United-Kingdom 9.04
South-Africa 8.74
Austria 8.67
Greece 8.63
Norway 8.6
Libya 8.27
Spain 7.97
Italy 7.72
New-Zealand 7.28
Iceland 7.24
Bosnia 7.13
Belarus 7.06
Malaysia 7.02
Slovakia 6.91
Ukraine 6.8
Iran 6.62
Venezuela 6.33
Bulgaria 6.22
France 6.18
Hungary 5.7
Portugal 5.67
Sweden 5.59
Switzerland 5.56
Croatia 5.3
Macedonia 5.3
China 4.64
Romania 4.53
Argentina 4.42
Uzbekistan 4.28
Lithuania 4.17
Thailand 4.17
Azerbaijan 4.13
Mexico 4.13
Lebanon 3.76
Jordan 3.69
Turkey 3.69
Chile 3.66
Mongolia 3.66
Syria 3.66
North-Korea 3.58
Latvia 3.25
Iraq 3.22
Botswana 2.78
Belize 2.67
Cuba 2.63
Egypt 2.26
Tunisia 2.26
Moldova 2.19
Uruguay 2.04
Brazil 1.86
Indonesia 1.5
Morocco 1.5
Namibia 1.39
Peru 1.39
Armenia 1.35
Columbia 1.35
India 1.35
Georgia 1.24
Vietnam 1.24
Bolivia 1.17
Kyrgyzstan 1.06
Yemen 1.02
Honduras 0.98
Guatemala 0.91
Pakistan 0.91
Angola 0.87
Swaziland 0.87
Western-Sahara 0.87
Zimbabwe 0.84
Palestine 0.76
Polen 0.76
Phillippines 0.76
Nigeria 0.69
Paraguay 0.65
Bhutan 0.58
Sri-Lanka 0.58
Congo 0.4
Ghana 0.4
Senegal 0.4
Benin 0.36
Kenya 0.32
Bangladesh 0.29
Cambodia 0.29
Sudan 0.29
Laos 0.25
Liberia 0.21
Zambia 0.21
Cameroon 0.18
Madagascar 0.14
Tanganyika 0.14
Tanzania 0.14
Eritrea 0.1
Mozambique 0.1
Nepal 0.1
Burkina-Faso 0.07
Ethiopia 0.07
Faroe-Islands 0.07
Rwanda 0.07
Burundi 0.03
Chad 0.03
Mali 0.03
(DATA : Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2008. Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions.
In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview.html)
So, the solution is to have less GDP. Back to the caves!. Who are behind all this CO2 conspiracy?, it is worst than Al-Qaida and deserve an equal treatment.
alaskabill (11:44:07) :
Does everyone in Mali have a “green job”?
If you consider herding and subsistence farming to be “green jobs”, then yes, 80% of the people in Mali are benefitting from the Green Economy. I suspect the Greenies are planning to turn us all into subsistence farmers.
timetochooseagain (11:37:01) :
I would think so, too. Plus all the arrogant hot air emanating from their politicans probably generates a few megawatts.
crosspatch (11:38:52) :
Don’t feel bad… you get caught out here far less often than I do and you post far more often. It seems obvious, though, that most of the comparisons of CO2 emissions to other figures are terribly inadequate and misleading. Many of the more “efficient” countries are abysmally poor or have a much different energy generation mix than we or the Aussies do. A lot of American CO2 production is the result of consumption, not production, and the result of our consumption is both a longer and healthier life span and better quality of life.
rephelan (11:56:32) :
LOL! Goat herding is a green job! Now all we have to worry about is PETA…
The bottom virtuos 80 countries (or so) below Switzerland have the same rank as they do in terms of prosperity, productivity, longevity….
Crosspatch, thanks for the GDP/CO2 link. Let’s condense it a bit, ignoring all of the tiny or unindustrialized countries (arbitrarily, those with a GDP < $100 Billion). This leaves 41 countries. Here is a sampling (higher values are better, i.e., more efficient):
1. Switzerland: 8.9
2. Sweden: 6.6
3. France: 5.4
14. United Kingdom: 3.7
22. United States: 1.9
39. China: 0.45
40. Russia: 0.39
41. Iran: 0.37
Despite what some posters assumed, the efficiency value for the USA is nothing to get excited about.
I always walk around with a balloon full of CO2 mounted on a stick //ahem
bradley13 (12:21:21) : That seems to (roughly) correlate with the level of manufacturing in said states. Also the bottom two are oil producers.
“oakgeo (11:25:51) :
Switzerland is the most efficient industrialized country, maybe due to its heavy weighting in financials rather than manufacturing.”
Some other reasons: Practically all electricity from water and nuclear, no coal. Houses with good windows and good insulation. Dense population, hence good public transport. Main industry: machines, chemicals. Small country, short travel. Not much farming, but lots of forests. No leftist majority in governement ever.
And there is a Swiss translation of Darrell Huff’s book from 1956.
Producing watches and concealing money must be pretty efficient.
crosspatch
“But at the same time, our production would be minimal and a good number of people in this world would starve as a result.”
Some greens wouldn’t mind that at all. See Paul Kingsnorth for example
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change.
I recall a very old Peanuts cartoon where, Linus I think, says “I love mankind its people I can’t stand”.
Frankly, I’m more interested in a higher level of income than a higher level of efficiency, not that anything is wrong with efficiency. Properly applied, efficiency can increase my income 🙂
I am also interested in cheap energy. For example, burn oil, nat gas, and coal while we (the USA) build out nuclear power. Take the coal ash and extract the uranium and thorium from it. Remove the toxic metals using the cheap energy and use the rest for cement.
Per Capita is a false metric and is useless in determining CO2 emissions or reductions. Here is why.
If canda wanted a 85% reduction in CO2 Emissions we could simple immigrate 300 Million Chinese and Indian subsistence farmers and give them the same conditions that they have now. No power, little aid and only small bit of land to live off of.
Nothing would need to be different for anyone else, and our per Capita number would be one of the lowest and China and India’s would hardly register the change.
That’s because in your example per capita CO2 emissions haven’t changed.
What has changed is the average per capita emissions of 2 countries. The alternative to using national average per capita is to measure each persons emissions individually, or measure the average of selected sub-national populations.
You then go on to list factors which you claim need to be taken into account and every single example you give is one that specifically should not be taken into account if the objective is to reduce CO2 emisssions, which presumably it is.
For example, you cite travel distances. If you wish to produce the most CO2 emission reductions then any allowance for distance would increase CO2 emissions relative to no allowance. Ditto for all the other examples.
Your post is typical of the garbled nonsense that comes out of the AGW camp and Climate Heretic is clearly a name you use here in order to mislead people.
Roger Sowell (10:17:28) :
Hot gases rise, and diffuse into the surrounding gas volume. Thus, the hot CO2 and water vapor from an exhaust stack on a power plant do indeed rise.
Plume modeling of gases is a well-known activity. Temperature of the exhaust stack is one key variable, also exit velocity, composition of the exhaust, height of the stack above ground, wind direction and velocity, and perhaps a few others.
True enough, but I was more referring to the warmists’ bogus emotionalizing of the C02 non-issue by showing “scary” photos of plumes of “C02 pollution” rising out of smokestacks and car tailpipes, and even smog.
timetochooseagain (09:40:20) wrote:
“What the hell is “equivalent carbon”? Some major games are being played here.”
I suspect that’s because nuclear power is counted as emitting carbon even though it doesn’t, because the greenies don’t want countries to use nuclear as a way to reduce CO2 emissions.
To answer the title question: Because Qatar wouldn’t put up their s#!+, that’s why.
We should be extracting far Northern oil as fast as we possibly can because if we get a repeat of something like the LIA, it is going to be very difficult to extract that oil.
Leave the tropical oil alone and go for polar oil. We aren’t going to be able to reach it when we really need it.
the answer to this question
– because they would end up in an ugly prison for an indefinite time.
– because these countries also have the highest birth rates disproving their assumed causation of exponental population growth by poverty. at least for them and comparable cultural societies.
This puts the whole agenda of transferring money, labour and power from the west to everybody else into question.
The chart is colorful, but wrong. The balloons are two-dimensional so they imply that the way to compare tonnage is by comparing areas of the balloons. But if you look at the numbers themselves you can see that’s not the case. It’s pi * r^2, right? You shouldn’t be comparing the areas of the balloon, it’s the diameter that matters.
However, a 1D chart verses a 2D wouldn’t have the same impact.
Either that, or the warming hysterics can’t do math. 😉
Does anyone have the data for CO2 production by wood/manure cooking and heating? Perhaps Mali is not so far behind in their production of life sustaining CO2 after all.
What country is “Nor-ssb”?
And this list for 2006 has different values (by a factor of 3 to 4 lower):
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/top2006.cap
Ranking of the world’s countries by 2006 per capita
fossil-fuel CO2 emission rates. National per capita
estimates (CO2_CAP) are expressed in metric tons of carbon.
Source: Tom Boden, Gregg Marland, and Bob Andres
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
doi 10.3334/CDIAC/00001
RANK NATION CO2_CAP
1 QATAR 13.46
2 KUWAIT 9.35
3 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES 9.00
4 BAHRAIN 7.82
5 TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO 6.90
6 LUXEMBOURG 6.53
7 NETHERLAND ANTILLES 6.21
8 ARUBA 6.12
9 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 5.18
10 AUSTRALIA 4.90
11 FALKLAND ISLANDS (MALVINAS) 4.60
12 CANADA 4.55
13 OMAN 4.38
14 SAUDI ARABIA 4.38
15 BRUNEI (DARUSSALAM) 4.21
16 FAEROE ISLANDS 3.83
17 GIBRALTAR 3.65
18 ESTONIA 3.56
19 FINLAND 3.45
“I wonder why Greenpeace never protests in Qatar?”
Because nobody protest the Arabs.
When you protest the Arabs nowadays, they get angry, they call out a Jihad and blow up your boat.
They will say “Hey you Green Piece of Shit” what the hell do you want…!
And they have Sharia Law.
They will cut of a hand, an arm or even a head when they think your messing with them
That’s why.
Yes, you have to give it to them. Those Greenpeace guys are clever.
They only want to bring down the civilized world.
I don’t see too much value to the per capita CO2 emissions. It doesn’t tell us much.
Just an example: Brazil’s per capita emissions are 1.86 tons, while Argentina’s are 4.42. Then we Argentineans are contrbuting to AGW more than Brazil, right?
The problem is Brazil has 180 million people and it emits 1.86 x 180 M = 334.8 M tons, while Artentina: 4.42 x 40 M = 176.8 M tons, that is about half the Brazilian production.
Perhaps we are eating too much beef per capita? Wrong. Brazil has more beef production and consumption than we have! Even tiny Uruguay is exporting more beef than we are…