Interesting dataset.
It would be a lot fairer to display tons of CO2 per inhabitant I think.
And that's before taking into account imported CO2.
Interesting dataset.
It would be a lot fairer to display tons of CO2 per inhabitant I think.
And that's before taking into account imported CO2.
Climate change isn't driven by per-inhabitant CO2 emissions. It's driven by total CO2 emissions, of which the US outputs 12% per year.
Climate change isn't driven by human defined borders either. It's driven by total CO2 emissions. If a per-capita rate is non sensical then border based emissions are even more non sensical. Greenland only emits 0.001% of the total. Greenland is 12000x a better country than the US wow. This is exactly why per-capita is used.
Yeah and this is clearest when you consider federations. Imagine if you count the US as 50 separate countries, suddenly they are much more climate friendly! That's of course absurd.
Climate change isn’t driven by borders but energy policy is defined within them.
And no policy is gonna willingly reduce energy consumption which is directly co-related with QOL when other countries have much higher per-capita consumption. Politically humans need fairness.
We don’t need to reduce energy consumption. We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
We know. There are many reasons why countries choose more polluting sources of energy. Part of which is costs. The world runs on incentives. Maybe rich countries like the US can subsidize clean energy for poorer countries like India. Because consumption is definitely not going to come down.
You say you know then directly contradict yourself by bringing up consumption again.
The United States already supports clean energy in India. India is not “poor”. It has a larger economy than the United Kingdom. 46.3% of India’s installed capacity is renewable and that mix is growing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India
> You say you know then directly contradict yourself by bringing up consumption again.
It's not a contradiction. Increasing consumption today will mean increase of greenhouse emissions. Any increase of consumption today still involves some increase in fossil fuels for many reasons like grid stability.
> The United States already supports clean energy in India.
They work together on projects. AFAIK the US doesn't subsidise anything for India or other countries.
> India is not “poor”.
It is. Its per capita GDP is $2,878. The US is $85,809. Thats a 30x difference. It is an incredibly poor country.
> It has a larger economy than the United Kingdom.
Philippines and Norway have the same total GDP too. It's silly to consider them equally rich.
> 46.3% of India’s installed capacity is renewable and that mix is growing.
Hell yeah! Hopefully it keeps growing. It's kinda hilarious that India is one of the few countries who will meet the Paris accord commitments. The US is still stuck at 23% and isn't even close to meeting its commitments.
People in India are poor but that doesn’t mean the country is poor. The Indian government has resources to build out renewables as evidenced by them doing exactly that. The United States does not provide much direct funding but you are the only one suggesting that is necessary.
> People in India are poor but that doesn’t mean the country is poor.
Please stop. By your logic any country with a lot of people is rich. I already pointed out Norway vs Philippines for you. It is dirt poor by all numbers. Their extreme poverty rate just dropped recently. Their annual budget is 1/10th of the US with 5x more people. Energy needs per person will grow by over 10x in the next few decades to match the US. There is a long way to go.
> The Indian government has resources to build out renewables as evidenced by them doing exactly that.
I'm actually very impressed to see India sticking to the Paris accords. What exactly is the excuse of the worlds greatest superpower? Maybe a century of polluting the world isn't enough.
> The United States does not provide much direct funding but you are the only one suggesting that is necessary.
You're right. It needs to first fix itself lol. Maybe ask India for help :p Then again if you don't understand why the rich countries need to try and incentivise the world to move faster to renewables then you don't understand the urgency of the matter.
The notion of subsidizing a foreign country that literally has nuclear weapons is ludicrous. US voters would never stand for that.
No voter would. Humans would rather die from climate change than try and work together. Our innate tribalism is what makes solutions to this problem hard.
That seems to be a very American perspective. Several European countries have or had Green Parties being part of the government. A German Land (state in US terminology) has a had Green prime minister for 10 years. One could debate whether they have made sufficient impact, but it's certainly very far from "no voter".
Why the dig at Americans? This is nothing more than tock’s misinformed personal opinion. The United States does work with India to develop green energy.
California is famous for green initiatives and my state of Washington trades clean energy with Canada. I’d be shocked if we are unique in that.
These agreements have been in place for generations. It’s obvious they have voter approval.
> Why the dig at Americans?
America deserves the dig. Pulling out of the Paris accords. 22% renewable usage compared to the 60% of Germany. And now climate change denial.
> The United States does work with India to develop green energy.
lmao.
> It’s obvious they have voter approval.
I mean they did just vote in the guy who calls climate change a hoax.
I forgot about the Green parties! Good to see them having such support!
Unfortunately support has not been growing for 10 years or so. Nowadays far right parties are making the headlines in most European countries.
And this is one of the reasons why the German economy has stagnated for years.
https://swiftpress.com/book/kaput/
Solar energy is currently the cheapest form of energy, cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas. You know the conspiracy theories about how the oil companies are keeping perpetual motion machines hidden? Solar panels are literally that. With the caveat that they only work in sunlight. So they're not great when you need energy at night. But even if you triple your costs to account for only working 8 hours a day, they're cheaper than anything else.
For a lot of industrial processes, being limited to running during sunny periods would cause costs to go up by a lot more than a factor of three. The grid scale storage necessary to make solar power work for heavy industry remains extremely expensive and capacity limited. Costs are starting to come down but it will take decades.
Solar + battery is now the cheapest. Except in the USA, where natural gas is heavily subsidized. Happily, deploying new gas plants is constrained by supply of turbines. So solar + battery wins by default.
Batteries (plus all the other associated equipment and maintenance) are hardly cheap in the quantities needed to keep heavy industry running 24×7. Battery storage holds promise for the future but so far it's only been used on relatively small demonstration projects. And some of those have been plagued by fires and outages.
> relatively small demonstration projects.
California has got really good at building giant batteries - At peak times they provide 30% of the state’s electricity (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/05/22/californi...) - The Economist.
California is the 4th largest economy in the world by the way. A bit larger than a “small demonstration”.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/solarstorage-is-so-much-farther-alon...
What's your next objection?
I don't have any objection, I'm just stating a reality: it's going to take decades to build out enough battery storage to make renewable energy practical for the base load required for heavy industry. This stuff doesn't scale up quickly regardless of costs or incentives. The places where battery storage is used today generally have high electricity prices and low industrial capacity. If we want to have cheap stuff then we need to have cheap electricity (and cheap industrial heat) available to make that stuff 24×7.
> Solar energy is currently the cheapest form of energy, cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas.
Cheaper before the incentives?
Yes. Even if you count the fossil fuel subsidies.
Can you share the source? I’m very curious.
First search result: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-and-solar-en...
For some reason, these savings never cascade down to the consumer. Solar energy is typically a surcharge, not a cost savings.
When I log into my utility account, I can opt into solar generated power for X $/kwh more, not less.
Solar is also the most democratic, as long as you can tolerate it not working at night. I encourage you to experiment with a small portable system. I did - a 30W panel, 9Ax12V SLA battery, off-the-shelf car inverter, packet of crimp connectors, spool of wire, crimp tool, the cheapest over-voltage shutoff controller I could find (just search for solar charge controller - although lead-acid chemistries are moderately tolerant to charging out of bounds, unlike lithium, which is why I suggest lead-acid).
I really think home battery power is going to be a standard feature in the near future. Like indoor plumbing and central HVAC.
My utility just adopted time of use billing and by my napkin math a battery system with one day of capacity will pay for itself in 5 years. And that’s without solar at all. The additional solar panel cost would pay off in under 3 years. And I have cheap electricity.
Yeah main issue is elasticity. But otherwise promising. China is adding insane solar capacity yearly so I guess they see it as promising too.
But the reason emissions happen is for per-inhabitant benefits. It's a very reasonable idea [0] to set a per-inhabitant goal and criticize countries exceeding that threshold (which the US would still fail at, but I'm arguing against the metric itself rather than US faults).
Take your position to something of an extreme -- the Vatican could open up 200 coal power plants for its holy Bitcoin operations and still be sufficiently less impactful to CO2 than the US that nobody would target them during climate talks. Rephrased from the other direction, each US citizen would blow their CO2 budget by buying a shirt per decade to get down to the Vatican's levels.
That's a common mental failure mode, analogous to the sorites paradox. Countries are made up of many small actors and decisions, and pretending otherwise is unlikely to help you achieve your goals.
[0] Mostly -- transitive effects like one country generating all the goods another country uses are harder to account for. Assuming we could measure perfectly though...
In context of the United States, there are a small number of actors that stand to lose billions to renewables.
I live in the Northeast. Solar reduced my grid demand by 40%. That translates to a full recoup of the investment in 60-65 months with subsidy, 100-110 without. The unsubsidized payback period is 1/3 of the projected useful life of the panels.
You know it’s a good idea because opponents big argument is safety of rooftop installers and future workers disposing of solar panels, topics that these folks DNGAF about in the least.
12% is quite low considering that the US is responsible for >20% of global industrial output.
Not really, by that metric Europe still comes out ahead.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
Europe has a relatively high carbon footprint per unit of output for things like animal husbandry compared to the US, they just don't do enough of it for it to add up.
>Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
This also works in reverse, eg. US importing goods from china and therefore not being on the hook for emissions generated by those goods. ourworldindata has another page that compares the difference between consumption based emissions and territorial emissions[1]. Looking at that page, consumption based emissions are 11% higher for the US vs 27% for the EU. That makes the US look better, but it's not enough to cancel out the fact that the US is 63% more carbon intensive than the EU.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
You're kinda contradicting yourself. You're right that it's about absolute numbers. But then you use a percentage.
perhaps 12% for 5% of the global population is too high. But you dont want to relate it to population. Relating to number of countries is rather non-sensical. Some are big (by productivity, area, population, etc.), some are tiny.
Making it relative to countries is useful because that is the delination along which policy is made.
Making it relative to people, IMO, only serves to obscure the fact that the US/China/etc are by far the biggest producers of emissions.
Writing climate policy with them in mind makes more sense than pushing for somewhere like Monaco to reduce emissions, even if their emissions per person are high.
Something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
How is that fair when a lot of industrial production was shifted to one region of the globe specifically? It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
>It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
>Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762344
No, it's pretty straightforward. Count where a given good is consumed rather then where it's produced. It has to be estimated, but that's also the case for territorial emissions or other economic figures like GDP, but we don't throw our hands up and say "well it's too hard and too prone to fudging so we might as well not bother".
>Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
What "feedback loops" are you talking about?
>That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
Ok but surely you must recognize that the US, where the average person drives a pickup/SUV to work is emitting more carbon than something like India where the average person gets around by walking or using motorbikes? That's the concept that conversations like "US emits more carbon per capita" are trying to capture. "The systems are global" sounds like an excuse to continue driving a F-150 to work because of some spurious arguments about how hard it's do to do carbon accounting 100% accurately.
>And that's before taking into account imported CO2.
It doesn't really make much of a difference. For US specifically there's about a 10% difference.
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
I believe the concept you are looking for is scope 3 emissions.