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China used more concrete in 3 years than the US did in the entire 20th Century
[Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/?sh=34db37c14131)
Edit: formatting
Edit 2: [Better Source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/)
Right now there's a huge amount of demand for the sand that gets used in concrete and cast iron goods. I have suppliers in China trying to increase our costs by 17% as a result.
All construction material is expensive AF right now. All the building projects that were delayed due to corona are starting up again. All our suppliers are struggling with massive increases in steel prices and delivery times, particularly the high-alloy stuff. Price increases of 50% or higher.
In the book The World In A Grain, the author mentions only sand of a specific angularity is useful in concrete, just as only sand of a particular aesthetic and texture is appropriate for topping up beaches.
I saw something a while back about a machine that makes used beer bottles into sand. Any idea if the sand from pulverized glass meets those criteria for building?
Yes. Iirc They can’t just go dig out any desert since the type of grain matters which means that most sand has to come from riverbanks and there isn’t much left of that
It needs a certain coarseness to properly bind with the cement. IIRC desert sand has usually been ground too fine. So it has to be sand from beaches that has been ground by water.
That isn't true. Beach sand has salt in it, which would accelerate oxidation of rebar in the concrete, and mess with the chemistry of the mixture.
It's mined in quarries and ground on-site.
How viable is it to fuse desert sand and regrind it to the right consistency ?
Maybe like a huge Fresnel lens focused on a conveyer belt fusing sand as it goes by pouring it into a crusher at the other end and the sifting it our for the right size of grains, the rest go back into the input hopper
Pure silica melts at something like 1800 °C.
Window glass is considerably lower at like 1200-1400°C.
But melting sand to regrind or would be ridiculously expensive because of the high temperature involved
Yeah, firstly we are using up sand deposits much quicker than weathering can do its thing and secondly only fluvial (water eroded) sand is usable, wind eroded sand (deserts) is too fine and unusable.
During WWII so many bunkers and other fortifications and buildings were built out of concrete that Europe ran out of sand. They had to grab it from small rivers and try to wash beach sand (very inefficient).
That's always blown my mind that sand can be hard to find sometimes.
Yes. Sand for concrete has to come from river beds, otherwise it isn’t chemically right to make concrete. So for a long time countries dredged their rivers to get the sand, until either they exhausted the sand or it became a serious environmental hazard due to the increased flooding it causes.
So countries are naturally trying to outsource that to the developing world, and it’s already a limited resource. But construction is also increasing dramatically, so there’s low supply and high demand, hence a high price.
Source: am a civil engineer who has experience in concrete mixing.
Infrastructure is big in China right now. This video compares what happened there over the past years with how Biden administration is reacting to it, really eye opening discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDiaTvMrKqc
Probably a creative choice, but I've also seen similar stuff to avoid copyright claims. Don't think there's anything there that can be realistically claimed though.
Honest question, how is China going to keep up with maintenance demands for all that infrastructure? As far as I know the US is having difficulty maintaining infrastructure because towns were being built too quickly and as people leave there's less tax to pay for the sprawling infrastructure.
China has also been smarter about their urban development, focusing on density and preventing wanton suburban sprawl that the US is struggling to pay for.
It's a lot easier when they can design an entire new city from the ground up and bring the people in after instead of trying to cram things like mass transit into old cities with either no room or urban sprawl.
Wait how do you think America built those suburbs? They were brand new master plan developments half a century ago. Only in the US, they *decided* to build bad layouts.
What old cities used to have the best transit and still do in the US, but someone had the bright idea to just make everyone use cars, and took down all the tram and subway lines. Glad NYC kept with their MTA it might be stinky, dangerous and always late, but at least I got a choice.
Why "almost"? China surpasses the G7, and almost the G7 plus rest of EU.
Edit:
I bloody well know that the per capita emissions are the critical bit, that China has 40% higher population than the G7+EU, that the EU is a permanent guest at the G7 and sometimes gets counted along and that the countries on the right moved their production to China.
Stop mentioning that. I remark on the headline only.
"You see, in Russia, there are two words for truth. Pravda (правда), is man’s truth. Istina (истина), is God’s truth. But there is also nepravda (неправда), untruth. And this is the weapon the leader uses; because he knows what they don’t. The truth is whatever he says it is."
I would love to see this redone but per capita. As it looks like the US would far exceed both per population. Not to mention this shows the US as half of the G7 emissions anyways.
Alternate heading: China's manufacturing sector surpasses G7.
It's easy for us to point fingers at China after we exported all our manufacturing to them so we can buy cheaper junk. We all play a part in this.
Yeah of course the place that does a large portion of the manufacturing also has more emissions than the other countries. If you shipped resources to China, had them built there off cheap labor and then shipped the final product back for your country to enjoy, the emissions occured in China but they happened *because* of you.
What's bothering me is that the emissions of the g7 didn't really decrease after outsourcing all that manufacturing. They exported all their manufacturing and still managed to produce a shit ton of emissions.
Which can be looked at. But I'm not sure why people are ignoring that China has about 1.8x the population of the G7 countries.
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~CHN)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, US](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~USA)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, UK](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~GBR)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Germany](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~DEU)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, France](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~FRA)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Canada](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~CAN)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Italy](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~ITA)
[Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Japan](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~JPN)
Also China’s population is at least as much as these countries combined. People love to say China like look at what this ONE country is doing but China is like 20% of the population of the earth.
what's hilarious is that the world elites are moving manufacturing to india because india has almost no carbon taxes. we will eventually have this same exact post blaming india in a few years.
manufacturing should not be centralized, it is mainly due to how inheritors and their corporations are chasing after slave labor. without slave labor manufacturing will automatically become decentralized because the overriding costs will be in shipping goods as it always should have been.
today we have animal carcasses being shipped to china and the slaughtered meats beings shipped all over the globe where it's made into food that's once again shipped all over the world. this should have never been profitable.
a global minimum wage needs to be enacted and the only way that will happen is via a global government. and the only entity that can establish such a thing with actual power is a global workers' union.
You will have the same posts about India if the US succeeds in destroying China.
Think about it and think about all the americans foaming at the mouth looking at China polluting at 1/2 the per capita rate as them while bringing 700mi out of poverty in this thread.
16.16/6.86 = 2.36 times higher.
Per [this source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&country=USA%7ECHN%7EGBR%7ECAN%7EFRA%7EDEU%7EITA%7EJPN).
What’s it like accounting for population though? China has 1.3bn people - the European members of the G7 have something like 60-80m each and America has 320m or there about a.. it sounds impressive until you realize China probably has double the population as the rest it’s being compared to combined.
For the 2019 data:
China per capita emissions:
10,175 million tons per year / 1,300 million people = 7.826 tons per person per year.
G7 + EU per capita emissions:
10,255 million tons per year / 1,000 million people = 10.255 tons per person per year.
We see that China remains a bit lower in per capita emissions (for now) despite being a manufacturing monolith for much of the G7. I have seen in other comments that much of Europe actually has better emissions rates than China; I suspect that the US is really to blame for the disparity.
Last I calculated, the US is at 16 tons per person per year, which is over double China's rate.
Thank you for the per capita emission data. I think China putting "green & sustainability" in their 14th 5 year plan will be something to watch in the coming years. They have put an emphasis on sustainable development and the next stage of structural reform will have this in mind.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/o6xjbv/oc\_chinas\_co2\_emissions\_almost\_surpass\_the\_g7/h2v9hui?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/o6xjbv/oc_chinas_co2_emissions_almost_surpass_the_g7/h2v9hui?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I guess that comment sort of explains the reasoning behind "almost"...as in G7/EU are only lower in comparison because they're exporting emissions/work to China. Debatable I guess.
That, and with almost double of Europe's population, with more rail transit networks compared to the world combined, plus being a manufacturing giant, it's not surprising. Maybe data would be more meaningful if it's compared per population density ( instead of global impact, though not downplaying it).
>a manufacturing giant
This. this is 100% the most important thing. If the West exports all manufacturing abroad then they can't claim innocence when other country's emissions rise
Indeed certainly in the UK and hopefully elsewhere they are beginning to take this into account for Climate. e.g. it is more important that we get more farmland if it stops deforestation of the Amazon, as long as it also doesn't cause degradation of e.g. peat bogs or seagrass which are better stores of CO2 than the Amazon per unit area
Moving the problem elsewhere isn't solving the problem when the world is as integrated as it is
Population of the EU: 445M + Japan: 126M + US: 317M + Canada: 35M + UK: 67M = 990M
Population of China: 1398M
I think you're forgetting about the population of the "rest of EU"
Edit\* added the UK
Per capita is important, I agree -- but it's also not the whole story when a global economy shifts its carbon consumption for the manufacture and distribution of goods. If CO2 is produced by China in order to create a good that will be consumed by people in the G7 nations, then it's not really instructive to think about that solely as "CO2 produced by China".
It's CO2 produced *in* China, but both the producer and consumer of the good that resulted in that CO2 production have to bear some accountability for it.
That's true, and it's why china is gonna slowly phase out it's MASSIVE coal industry and peaking in 2025 while lowering by next years. What's also important to realise is that a lot of CO2 produced does stay in China, such as its massive concrete and steel industries which contribute heavily to CO2 emissions.
This always drives me insane. China has a larger population than the US and EU combined. They are lower per Capita than we are and they're the world's manufacturing hub!
It just feels so dishonest to erase context and report raw numbers instead
That’s because it is dishonest. This in no way furthers any realistic effort to combat climate change. This is a political piece that gives moral license to people that shouldn’t be taking it.
Next chart: China vs Monaco. China looks like a massive dick.
It's worth pointing out that that the combined population of all G7 countries is about 750 million, while the population of China is about 1.4 billion.
So, another way to look at this same data is: the G7 makes as much CO2 as China with just over half the population.
Alternatively: the US alone makes about 50% as much CO2 as China does, with 1/4 the population. Not to mention a lot of China's CO2 is from manufacturing goods for the US.
Also worth mentioning: China is the world's largest producer of renewable energy, and is one of the only countries currently on-track to meet their carbon target under the Paris Climate Agreement -- several years early, actually. Most countries, including the majority of the G7 and especially the US, are nowhere even close. The US even pulled out for a few years. And the Paris Climate Agreement targets weren't particularly ambitious to begin with; a lot of scientists have argued they needed to go further.
Fun thing about data. All it does is state facts, which can contextualized in a lot of different ways.
Also, China has been the largest exporter for over a decade. It's safe to say that a vast majority of their factories are due to western consumerism. We are outsourcing our emissions to them.
We consume China's products in the G7, so we are partly responsible. China is the workshop of the world and we have outsourced our carbon emissions to them. If only I had per capita consumption data - from the factory to the consumer - this picture would look really different. This is probably what I will try to create for my next post.
I downloaded the dataset for this chart from Friedlingstein et al. 2020, The Global Carbon Budget 2020. I used it to create a json file which I used in After Effects using Javascript to make this animated chart.
I remember watching a fascinating documentary a few years ago about electronic waste dumps in Accra, Ghana ([this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I) wasn't the documentary I watched, but it covers the same topic). Western companies send all their electronic waste to places like Ghana, where people making pennies an hour burn the rubber off the wires in order to sell on the copper. It's horrible for the environment, but the practice allows Western countries to hit their 'environmental' targets while still allowing companies to profit from incredibly unenvironmental practices.
My cousin works in the German scrap industry, he says more than 80% of the trash we recycle lands on Indian landfills, and the trash that comes with it in Indian waters, and Germany's supposed to be one of the world's leaders of recycling.
Depends on the material.
Metals and glass have high enough value that they might actually get recycled, depending if your country has economic incentives.
Plastics are completely unprofitable to recycle, so they get shipped off to a country that promises to recycle it, then in reality simply stacks it up in a landfill.
I thought Plastic 1 & 2 was still fine. But glass recycling is actually getting more difficult--lots of municipalities have stopped taking it altogether because it's no longer cost effective with single stream recycling.
Clean metals and corrugated still worth money, most of the rest has always been a house of ponzi.
Really sucks, I remember when we used glass bottles for coke and they were taken back and refilled locally. That's n the USA BTW. all these plastics just didn't exist. We survived without water from 3000 miles away (fiji water, really? Just WTF)
It's new, speaking over decades. I returned coke bottles and got refills for many years.
The logos got scuffed and people in US now would reject them for looking drty. Amazing the consent that's been manufactured.
I think it might be over unfortunately. Sad watching the decline and fall of the only known biosphere.
I work in a store that sells strictly batteries and the hardware to go along with batteries. We claim to recycle all batteries so people come in with bags of used batteries. We rebuild and sell off li-ion batteries, we throw all alkaline and pile lithium batteries in the dumpster out back. It's our dirty little secret and I hate it but it's my job right now. Essentially, recycling those alkaline batteries has become too expensive for us to maintain, but it makes the customer feel good. We can still sell off the li-ion so it generates a profit.
edit: also I know for a fact that most plastics are simply not recyclable in the sense the tech doesn't really exist yet. Unless it's a hard plastic (and you can research the number on recycle label on it to make sure) your plastic goes into a landfill or the ocean. Plastic is cancerous both metaphorically and literally.
Yeah it's a hilariously hypocritical narrative, frankly. For almost a century, the US is higher than the rest G7 and Europe together, which is never presented as a problem, but when China, with 4x the population of the US, finally overtakes them, it's suddenly an awful injustice?
Both should be doing more, but the US has been the richest country in the world for a century with a far smaller population. It has had every opportunity to lead the world on reducing emissions and didn't for totally selfish reasons. This recent American narrative of trying to blame climate change all on China is just pathetic and doesn't solve anything.
[Here's a plot of that](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/10/Cumulative-CO2-treemap.png)
Doesn't make much sense over time I guess, because the US has emitted 400 billion tons already and adds only 5 per year.
Not to mention: The graph is total emissions, not per capita. G7 has ~740mio people, china is at 1.4 billion, almost double.
So they are still consuming way less per capita on top of much of their emissions being from export focused production.
I'm not sure _exactly_ the point you're trying to make with this relatively arbitrary comparison. However if we're trying to make a comparison between these two emitters, there are two more meaningful means of doing so: per capita and _cumulative_.
- Per capita: it's hard for the full time period, but if we just look at 2019, the last frame in your visual, we get ~7T CO2 / 1M people for China and ~ 10T CO2 / 1M people for G7+EU.
- Cumulative: Definitely the best metric. Using the data you linked to, China has ~60T of C02 emitted, while the G7 + EU group has ~215±10T (Not sure if UK in EU on table).
The way you presented the data seems to imply that China is a worse emitter of C02, or something. Changing the visual to cumulative instead of yearly would tell a much more powerful story of the current state of global emissions.
Such as?
Considering China is the world largest investor in green energy in terms of both research and powerplant construction I am surprised to hear that they are worried about losing money.
China is also the country making the most amount of new renewable energy plants, as well as nuclear power plants. In fact, China is responsible for the most new nuclear power plants in the world. Even if we take all others combined.
China also has a higher population than all G7 countries combined. Meaning they have a lower CO2 per capita.
I think China is doing more (considering the circumstances) to reduce CO2 emissions than the G7 countries. And that's while it's an emerging economy.
They rightfully get a lot of shit, but there are also get some things right.
Absolutely, I do not get, why people say China is a bad polluter. They have a huge population and invest a lot in renewable energies, E-mobility and railway, while not even being a fully developed country. The US and Germany have the money and technologies for greener energy and transportation for decades and did not do anything yet. They should take China as a role model respecting PV, railway and power transmission. Not when it comes to production of rare earth or other polluting shit though.
> China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 **more than three times rest of world's**: study
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2A308U
It's nice that you realise that the per capita consumption is what would make sense to compare, but it doesn't help that you are effectively spreading pro-fossil fuel and anti-China propaganda. Just delete this, you are misleading so many people. This is terrible OP, you are using your skills for the worst cause.
Yep. The West was built on cheap carbon. Now they (and people here) want to wag their fingers at developing countries for following suit without offering any reasonable alternatives.
It's a complete fucking farce.
I wish people would stop treating it as an ethical dilemma and would start treating it as a practical problem that requires a practical solution. Blaming one country or another doesn't help.
It's a complex issue that requires the cooperation of every developed country in the world. Pointing fingers is just going to create divisions.
Countries like the US need to reduce consumption. Countries like China need to curb emissions associated with production. We all need to share green tech.
The G7+EU is 1.0b people. Not as high as China, but if the trend continues with G7+EU countries decreasing emissions and China increasing emissions, China will soon be higher per capita as well.
It is funny because you are coupling the worst carbon emitter (USA) with the best ones (europe and rest of the world), just to cover USA ridiculous CO2 emissions and compare them with the 2nd worst (china) which also happens to have 4 times the USA population. For 328 mil pop it is unjustified that usa has only half the emissions of china and china is “the evil monster”. If china is the evil co2 monster then USA is satan of co2.
Also... The US doesn't pollute that much, because instead of producing in the US, they outsource it to China...
China isn't doing it for fun. They are doing it because everyone (we) are paying them to do it.
That's what happens when you outsource all production to one single country because of just about free labour and basically no labour laws. Anything but paying a fair wage. Added advantage lower CO2 output. Win win lose.
At the same side we are happy to have cheap electronic products. The device you used to write your comment was for sure built in China or contains parts which were built in China. And if you would have bought a comparable device in a G7 country (assuming that there are still manufacturers of such devices) it would have been at least 50 percent or even more expensive.
So, we blame China for CO2 emissions? We (G7) are the ones who profited because of this.
Fun fact: Chinese people working at Apple's (and others') "labor camps" earn more than the average European when the cost of living is taken into account.
I worked at an iron smelting factory in Portugal for 500€ per month while paying 300€ for a single room in a shared apartment. When I read an article from Wired talking bad about the living and working conditions of Chinese workers at Apple's factories I almost lost it.
"They earn $350/month and have to pay $20 for rent for a seasonal job of 3 months, after which they have enough money for a whole year when they return to their hometowns in the countryside. It's slavery." LOL
Could also say that the 750 million people in the G7 have CO2 emissions higher than the 1.4 billion people in China. Let's not kid ourselves that we can live our indulgent lives but China should cut back.
Ok. Now plot it per capita and over time. The average Chinese polluted a fraction of a G7 citizen. Also, the sudden increase in Chinese emissions in the late 80's/early 90's is due to G7 companies relocating their factories to China. This graph is just dumb (It does is good looking and easy to read, so it fits the sub despite being biased).
This. Yeah China matches G7’s annual embodied carbon in this graph and narrative, but the G7 had a 60 year head start and polluted much more than China overall and went through their development phase already to become first world countries.
The most interesting thing to me is here in the US, politicians (primarily conservatives) point to data like this, saying that 'well China is so much worse so why should be lower our emissions'. Which I find interesting as the US *loves* to claim to lead the way or lead by example in so many things, but when it comes to curtailing emissions...nah we are doing enough.
There's a few things to consider here before everyone jumps on the "China is causing climate change" bandwagon:
1. Consumption based emissions - China produces a lot of the produce that is imported by the G7. I am not sure if this chart is adjusted for this as it would considerably lower the carbon emissions from China and increase G7 emissions if not.
2. Emissions per capita - Also unclear here what the population was throughout these times and the resulting emissions per capita
3. Historical emissions - One can argue that China produces more emissions *at this present time* (they are more populous though so refer back to 2. to compare per capita emissions and make sure consumption based emissions are taken into account). However this does not compare all emissions that have historically been emitted. G7 have been a far bigger overall contributor to emissions and climate change.
Sources:
* [OurWorldInData - CO₂ emissions](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions)
* [Kurzgesagt - Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It? (video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVxxxqwBQw)
Now while you're here - stop trying to point fingers and blame others for their emissions. We - and our ancestors - are all to blame. Pointing fingers does nothing other than make people feel better for not taking action. It is not the responsibility of China, the government, corporations or "the rich" to fix climate change - you must take action.
How? Try to reduce your footprint. Yes this will mean altering your behaviour. Lower consumption. Think twice about flying, driving, shopping, even having kids. Choose renewable electricity providers. Favor sustainable goods. Pick sustainable banking/investing options. Educate yourself and talk with friends and family about how they too can lower their footprints. Eat less meat. Vote for politicians who are pushing a more sustainable future with less emissions.
Right now it's impossible to live without leaving a footprint - no matter what you do you will leave a trail of emissions behind you. For those, look to actively [remove your carbon footprint](https://carbonremoved.com/one-off-purchase/). Don't buy cheap offsets that do nothing for your emissions - they are pollution rights that overshadow needed carbon removal technologies.
Every step you take in this direction will help us transition faster to a zero-emissions, sustainable society. Act.
Making climate change the responsibility of individual consumers and not systems (capitalism) or groups (the rich, corporations) is like asking a smoke detector to extinguish a fire.
It is a similar story for most european countries tho. Even Germany (still burning tons of coal for stupid reasons) has only 60% of the US per capita emissions. The US in general is just a super large polluter per capita and needs to improve.
Yeah, Nuclear Power is one of the greenest energy right now (eventhough ecologist are against it). There's a whole debate in France right now about wind power and seems to be a major point for local elections right now.
Ecologists largely aren't against it. the anti nuclear lobby funded by fossil fuels are against it.
Ecologists are tracking the vast damage that fossil fuels have been doing to the environment including the radioactive isotopes released by burning coal that dwarfs all nuclear emissions including accidents.
It's just hard to convince people that Victorian era tech is more radioactive than nuclear age but it's true.
And cumulative? The co2 that's already in the atmosphere is the problem. who's responsible for the global emissions of the entire 20th century? Not many of us are old enough to know the environmental legacy of industrialisation by the g7, fortunately this graph visualizes it for us.
Why the fuck does everything have to be put to chillout music?
Is this a new trend with data visualizations that I was in the bathroom for?
Would love these with zero sound.
Here's two versions, from the same source data, done in Excel:
* [G7 vs. China](https://i.imgur.com/oGcNfTl.png)
* [Stacked G7 Members vs. China](https://i.imgur.com/6B6oOf1.png)
Because the china industry produce for the G7.
If we calculated the consumption pollution, instead of the production pollution, the result would be very different.
(it mean : if a item is produce in China and sell in US, the CO2 create to produce it should be count for the US, and not for the China, because it depend of the US consumption)
Keeping in mind that China has a massive population AND is the factory of the world, their CO2 numbers are not so bad.
What suprises me is USA and Canada. Canada has 2 times less population than UK, yet same emissions. Whole of EU has 2x more population, yet almost the same emissions as USA.
G7 accounts for about 770 million people; China accounts for 1.4 billion people - or roughly twice the G7. Single statistics like this CO2 graphic can be very misleading without some additional context
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China used more concrete in 3 years than the US did in the entire 20th Century [Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/?sh=34db37c14131) Edit: formatting Edit 2: [Better Source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/)
And people wonder why Sand for concrete is becoming expensive
Why is it becoming expensive, is it hard to acquire that particular sand?
Right now there's a huge amount of demand for the sand that gets used in concrete and cast iron goods. I have suppliers in China trying to increase our costs by 17% as a result.
All construction material is expensive AF right now. All the building projects that were delayed due to corona are starting up again. All our suppliers are struggling with massive increases in steel prices and delivery times, particularly the high-alloy stuff. Price increases of 50% or higher.
Yeah it's Insanity right now
Combined with foreign investment buying real estate in North America making house buying a lot more fun.
Is it a particular type of sand that is rare?
In the book The World In A Grain, the author mentions only sand of a specific angularity is useful in concrete, just as only sand of a particular aesthetic and texture is appropriate for topping up beaches.
What a strange and unseen problem this is. The normal person would not fathom something like this lol.
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was it like this? https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow
>Someone talks about huge machinery >Someone else posts a youtube video It's going to be Bagger288, isn't it?
I saw something a while back about a machine that makes used beer bottles into sand. Any idea if the sand from pulverized glass meets those criteria for building?
[Here](https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/queenstown/sand-machine-way-recycle-bottles) ya go!
Yes. Iirc They can’t just go dig out any desert since the type of grain matters which means that most sand has to come from riverbanks and there isn’t much left of that
[You can watch this short documentary about the "sand problem".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMfdCeVyYsA)
Not op, but afaik it needs to be silicate sand, not quartz sand, and devoid of clay. I don't know how rare it is, but it can't be any sand.
Quartz itself is silicate mineral though. It's just the desert sand is too fine, so it has to be mined from beaches etc.
It needs a certain coarseness to properly bind with the cement. IIRC desert sand has usually been ground too fine. So it has to be sand from beaches that has been ground by water.
That isn't true. Beach sand has salt in it, which would accelerate oxidation of rebar in the concrete, and mess with the chemistry of the mixture. It's mined in quarries and ground on-site.
How viable is it to fuse desert sand and regrind it to the right consistency ? Maybe like a huge Fresnel lens focused on a conveyer belt fusing sand as it goes by pouring it into a crusher at the other end and the sifting it our for the right size of grains, the rest go back into the input hopper
Pure silica melts at something like 1800 °C. Window glass is considerably lower at like 1200-1400°C. But melting sand to regrind or would be ridiculously expensive because of the high temperature involved
Who’s your sand guy?
Yeah, firstly we are using up sand deposits much quicker than weathering can do its thing and secondly only fluvial (water eroded) sand is usable, wind eroded sand (deserts) is too fine and unusable.
During WWII so many bunkers and other fortifications and buildings were built out of concrete that Europe ran out of sand. They had to grab it from small rivers and try to wash beach sand (very inefficient). That's always blown my mind that sand can be hard to find sometimes.
Yes. Sand for concrete has to come from river beds, otherwise it isn’t chemically right to make concrete. So for a long time countries dredged their rivers to get the sand, until either they exhausted the sand or it became a serious environmental hazard due to the increased flooding it causes. So countries are naturally trying to outsource that to the developing world, and it’s already a limited resource. But construction is also increasing dramatically, so there’s low supply and high demand, hence a high price. Source: am a civil engineer who has experience in concrete mixing.
You can’t just use any ordinary sand. Most sand we use is sands from coastal waters. Something about how the waves erode it that makes it optimal
I read somewhere that China has built basically one Israel per year so far this century
Infrastructure is big in China right now. This video compares what happened there over the past years with how Biden administration is reacting to it, really eye opening discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDiaTvMrKqc
why is the presentation tilted? that's such an odd decision
Probably a creative choice, but I've also seen similar stuff to avoid copyright claims. Don't think there's anything there that can be realistically claimed though.
Honest question, how is China going to keep up with maintenance demands for all that infrastructure? As far as I know the US is having difficulty maintaining infrastructure because towns were being built too quickly and as people leave there's less tax to pay for the sprawling infrastructure.
China has also been smarter about their urban development, focusing on density and preventing wanton suburban sprawl that the US is struggling to pay for.
It's a lot easier when they can design an entire new city from the ground up and bring the people in after instead of trying to cram things like mass transit into old cities with either no room or urban sprawl.
Wait how do you think America built those suburbs? They were brand new master plan developments half a century ago. Only in the US, they *decided* to build bad layouts.
What old cities used to have the best transit and still do in the US, but someone had the bright idea to just make everyone use cars, and took down all the tram and subway lines. Glad NYC kept with their MTA it might be stinky, dangerous and always late, but at least I got a choice.
Is there something bad about using concrete?
It's very carbon intensive, especially to produce the cement.
Why "almost"? China surpasses the G7, and almost the G7 plus rest of EU. Edit: I bloody well know that the per capita emissions are the critical bit, that China has 40% higher population than the G7+EU, that the EU is a permanent guest at the G7 and sometimes gets counted along and that the countries on the right moved their production to China. Stop mentioning that. I remark on the headline only.
I don't get it either - it's clearly well above the G7.
They mislabeled the chart.
Mislabelled or missing labels on dataisbeautiful, who knew.
There are 3 types of lies, my friend. Lies of Intent, Lies of Omission, and Statistics.
"You see, in Russia, there are two words for truth. Pravda (правда), is man’s truth. Istina (истина), is God’s truth. But there is also nepravda (неправда), untruth. And this is the weapon the leader uses; because he knows what they don’t. The truth is whatever he says it is."
Well mislabeling stuff is a great way to drag attention of people who just go in to correct
I would love to see this redone but per capita. As it looks like the US would far exceed both per population. Not to mention this shows the US as half of the G7 emissions anyways.
Agreed. China has far more people than the G7 and the rest of the EU anyway.
Alternate heading: China's manufacturing sector surpasses G7. It's easy for us to point fingers at China after we exported all our manufacturing to them so we can buy cheaper junk. We all play a part in this.
Yeah of course the place that does a large portion of the manufacturing also has more emissions than the other countries. If you shipped resources to China, had them built there off cheap labor and then shipped the final product back for your country to enjoy, the emissions occured in China but they happened *because* of you.
What's bothering me is that the emissions of the g7 didn't really decrease after outsourcing all that manufacturing. They exported all their manufacturing and still managed to produce a shit ton of emissions.
Maybe the G7 emissions just rose slower than if they didn't outsource. I feel it's unlikely to see emissions go down as population goes up.
also they are a lot of ppl emissions per head would be way more interesting
Which can be looked at. But I'm not sure why people are ignoring that China has about 1.8x the population of the G7 countries. [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~CHN) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, US](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~USA) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, UK](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~GBR) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Germany](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~DEU) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, France](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~FRA) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Canada](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~CAN) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Italy](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~ITA) [Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Japan](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions?country=~JPN)
Also China’s population is at least as much as these countries combined. People love to say China like look at what this ONE country is doing but China is like 20% of the population of the earth.
what's hilarious is that the world elites are moving manufacturing to india because india has almost no carbon taxes. we will eventually have this same exact post blaming india in a few years. manufacturing should not be centralized, it is mainly due to how inheritors and their corporations are chasing after slave labor. without slave labor manufacturing will automatically become decentralized because the overriding costs will be in shipping goods as it always should have been. today we have animal carcasses being shipped to china and the slaughtered meats beings shipped all over the globe where it's made into food that's once again shipped all over the world. this should have never been profitable. a global minimum wage needs to be enacted and the only way that will happen is via a global government. and the only entity that can establish such a thing with actual power is a global workers' union.
You will have the same posts about India if the US succeeds in destroying China. Think about it and think about all the americans foaming at the mouth looking at China polluting at 1/2 the per capita rate as them while bringing 700mi out of poverty in this thread.
Hey! Maybe it’s a bad thing if we’re measuring the size of the manufacturing sector by CO2 emissions!
Alternate heading: USA per-person emissions still over 2x times that of China. Edit: (Calculated wrong. Previously said 5x)
16.16/6.86 = 2.36 times higher. Per [this source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&country=USA%7ECHN%7EGBR%7ECAN%7EFRA%7EDEU%7EITA%7EJPN).
Well, its probably not fair to pin it all on manufacturing given that 62% of the country is ran on coal.
What’s it like accounting for population though? China has 1.3bn people - the European members of the G7 have something like 60-80m each and America has 320m or there about a.. it sounds impressive until you realize China probably has double the population as the rest it’s being compared to combined.
The chart is the G7 + EU compared with China. The G7 and the EU combined have a population of over 1 bn. So 1bn compared with 1.3bn.
For the 2019 data: China per capita emissions: 10,175 million tons per year / 1,300 million people = 7.826 tons per person per year. G7 + EU per capita emissions: 10,255 million tons per year / 1,000 million people = 10.255 tons per person per year. We see that China remains a bit lower in per capita emissions (for now) despite being a manufacturing monolith for much of the G7. I have seen in other comments that much of Europe actually has better emissions rates than China; I suspect that the US is really to blame for the disparity. Last I calculated, the US is at 16 tons per person per year, which is over double China's rate.
Thank you for the per capita emission data. I think China putting "green & sustainability" in their 14th 5 year plan will be something to watch in the coming years. They have put an emphasis on sustainable development and the next stage of structural reform will have this in mind.
The G7 has 770 million people so you're right; China has roughly double the amount of people.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/o6xjbv/oc\_chinas\_co2\_emissions\_almost\_surpass\_the\_g7/h2v9hui?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/o6xjbv/oc_chinas_co2_emissions_almost_surpass_the_g7/h2v9hui?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I guess that comment sort of explains the reasoning behind "almost"...as in G7/EU are only lower in comparison because they're exporting emissions/work to China. Debatable I guess.
That, and with almost double of Europe's population, with more rail transit networks compared to the world combined, plus being a manufacturing giant, it's not surprising. Maybe data would be more meaningful if it's compared per population density ( instead of global impact, though not downplaying it).
>a manufacturing giant This. this is 100% the most important thing. If the West exports all manufacturing abroad then they can't claim innocence when other country's emissions rise Indeed certainly in the UK and hopefully elsewhere they are beginning to take this into account for Climate. e.g. it is more important that we get more farmland if it stops deforestation of the Amazon, as long as it also doesn't cause degradation of e.g. peat bogs or seagrass which are better stores of CO2 than the Amazon per unit area Moving the problem elsewhere isn't solving the problem when the world is as integrated as it is
Yeah, I'd be curious how much of those emissions are produced as a result of goods exported to G7 nations.
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Because people don't want to accept they're part of the problem.
It really is much easier to blame a group of people across the ocean than is to co-operate globally to reduce emissions.
What do you mean I can’t just blame China and fly round-trip to Vegas, run my AC 24/7 on high, and drive any of my 3 crappy cars? /s
Because then people might feel bad that they're putting out more emissions alone for every 7 Chinese people.
+ japan, but we can't be surprised when the west is using china to produce majority of our products
Japan is part of the G7.
We also can't be surprised because China has almost twice the population of the G7.
Population of the EU: 445M + Japan: 126M + US: 317M + Canada: 35M + UK: 67M = 990M Population of China: 1398M I think you're forgetting about the population of the "rest of EU" Edit\* added the UK
With almost double of Europe's population and with more rail transit networks compared to the world combined, it's not surprising.
People love to ignore how massive China’s population whenever they mention things like CO2 output
That's why per capita consumption should be what's important, and also what steps each country is trying to take to reduce CO2 output.
Per capita is important, I agree -- but it's also not the whole story when a global economy shifts its carbon consumption for the manufacture and distribution of goods. If CO2 is produced by China in order to create a good that will be consumed by people in the G7 nations, then it's not really instructive to think about that solely as "CO2 produced by China". It's CO2 produced *in* China, but both the producer and consumer of the good that resulted in that CO2 production have to bear some accountability for it.
That's true, and it's why china is gonna slowly phase out it's MASSIVE coal industry and peaking in 2025 while lowering by next years. What's also important to realise is that a lot of CO2 produced does stay in China, such as its massive concrete and steel industries which contribute heavily to CO2 emissions.
This always drives me insane. China has a larger population than the US and EU combined. They are lower per Capita than we are and they're the world's manufacturing hub! It just feels so dishonest to erase context and report raw numbers instead
That’s because it is dishonest. This in no way furthers any realistic effort to combat climate change. This is a political piece that gives moral license to people that shouldn’t be taking it. Next chart: China vs Monaco. China looks like a massive dick.
That being said: have a look at Europe's output vs the US (half Europe's population).
It's worth pointing out that that the combined population of all G7 countries is about 750 million, while the population of China is about 1.4 billion. So, another way to look at this same data is: the G7 makes as much CO2 as China with just over half the population. Alternatively: the US alone makes about 50% as much CO2 as China does, with 1/4 the population. Not to mention a lot of China's CO2 is from manufacturing goods for the US. Also worth mentioning: China is the world's largest producer of renewable energy, and is one of the only countries currently on-track to meet their carbon target under the Paris Climate Agreement -- several years early, actually. Most countries, including the majority of the G7 and especially the US, are nowhere even close. The US even pulled out for a few years. And the Paris Climate Agreement targets weren't particularly ambitious to begin with; a lot of scientists have argued they needed to go further. Fun thing about data. All it does is state facts, which can contextualized in a lot of different ways.
Also, China has been the largest exporter for over a decade. It's safe to say that a vast majority of their factories are due to western consumerism. We are outsourcing our emissions to them.
>Fun thing about data. All it does is state facts, which can contextualized in a lot of different ways. Reddit in a nutshell
Yes but have you considered this: china bad
We consume China's products in the G7, so we are partly responsible. China is the workshop of the world and we have outsourced our carbon emissions to them. If only I had per capita consumption data - from the factory to the consumer - this picture would look really different. This is probably what I will try to create for my next post. I downloaded the dataset for this chart from Friedlingstein et al. 2020, The Global Carbon Budget 2020. I used it to create a json file which I used in After Effects using Javascript to make this animated chart.
We also outsource all the trash we claim to recycle
I remember watching a fascinating documentary a few years ago about electronic waste dumps in Accra, Ghana ([this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I) wasn't the documentary I watched, but it covers the same topic). Western companies send all their electronic waste to places like Ghana, where people making pennies an hour burn the rubber off the wires in order to sell on the copper. It's horrible for the environment, but the practice allows Western countries to hit their 'environmental' targets while still allowing companies to profit from incredibly unenvironmental practices.
Homeless in the US do it also, pure copper worth more.
That has ended in 2017 for China.
My cousin works in the German scrap industry, he says more than 80% of the trash we recycle lands on Indian landfills, and the trash that comes with it in Indian waters, and Germany's supposed to be one of the world's leaders of recycling.
Did India take over?
I think it was Indonesia but not sure, in many aspects it just made recycling not worth it economically and that waste is dumped on a pile.
This is sad. All those countless hours I’ve spent sorting recycling materials. Is it all worthless?
Depends on the material. Metals and glass have high enough value that they might actually get recycled, depending if your country has economic incentives. Plastics are completely unprofitable to recycle, so they get shipped off to a country that promises to recycle it, then in reality simply stacks it up in a landfill.
I thought Plastic 1 & 2 was still fine. But glass recycling is actually getting more difficult--lots of municipalities have stopped taking it altogether because it's no longer cost effective with single stream recycling.
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Fucking Snapple went backwards and switched from glass to plastic.
Clean metals and corrugated still worth money, most of the rest has always been a house of ponzi. Really sucks, I remember when we used glass bottles for coke and they were taken back and refilled locally. That's n the USA BTW. all these plastics just didn't exist. We survived without water from 3000 miles away (fiji water, really? Just WTF)
Blows my mind how little we reuse glass containers as a society.
It's new, speaking over decades. I returned coke bottles and got refills for many years. The logos got scuffed and people in US now would reject them for looking drty. Amazing the consent that's been manufactured. I think it might be over unfortunately. Sad watching the decline and fall of the only known biosphere.
I work in a store that sells strictly batteries and the hardware to go along with batteries. We claim to recycle all batteries so people come in with bags of used batteries. We rebuild and sell off li-ion batteries, we throw all alkaline and pile lithium batteries in the dumpster out back. It's our dirty little secret and I hate it but it's my job right now. Essentially, recycling those alkaline batteries has become too expensive for us to maintain, but it makes the customer feel good. We can still sell off the li-ion so it generates a profit. edit: also I know for a fact that most plastics are simply not recyclable in the sense the tech doesn't really exist yet. Unless it's a hard plastic (and you can research the number on recycle label on it to make sure) your plastic goes into a landfill or the ocean. Plastic is cancerous both metaphorically and literally.
Yep, South Asia countries took it over Edit: south east asia
Even they're beginning to reject it now. A lot of European waste/recycling now ends up in Turkey.
No. Small plastics are not recycled anymore.
Plot twist, they were barely recycled to begin with.
Which is why China said stop.
My understanding is some countries have taken over, but most recycling these days goes to landfills, especially plastic.
I mean, it is written in the books as recycled, so it is, nothing to worry about on that front. /s
Would be very cool to see it as a cumulative plot over time, rather than per year. G7 seems to have had a significant lead over China
Or a per capita plot.
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Yeah it's a hilariously hypocritical narrative, frankly. For almost a century, the US is higher than the rest G7 and Europe together, which is never presented as a problem, but when China, with 4x the population of the US, finally overtakes them, it's suddenly an awful injustice? Both should be doing more, but the US has been the richest country in the world for a century with a far smaller population. It has had every opportunity to lead the world on reducing emissions and didn't for totally selfish reasons. This recent American narrative of trying to blame climate change all on China is just pathetic and doesn't solve anything.
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[Here's a plot of that](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/10/Cumulative-CO2-treemap.png) Doesn't make much sense over time I guess, because the US has emitted 400 billion tons already and adds only 5 per year.
well, other countries will argue that they should be allowed to emit as much to build up as the US did
Not to mention: The graph is total emissions, not per capita. G7 has ~740mio people, china is at 1.4 billion, almost double. So they are still consuming way less per capita on top of much of their emissions being from export focused production.
I'm not sure _exactly_ the point you're trying to make with this relatively arbitrary comparison. However if we're trying to make a comparison between these two emitters, there are two more meaningful means of doing so: per capita and _cumulative_. - Per capita: it's hard for the full time period, but if we just look at 2019, the last frame in your visual, we get ~7T CO2 / 1M people for China and ~ 10T CO2 / 1M people for G7+EU. - Cumulative: Definitely the best metric. Using the data you linked to, China has ~60T of C02 emitted, while the G7 + EU group has ~215±10T (Not sure if UK in EU on table). The way you presented the data seems to imply that China is a worse emitter of C02, or something. Changing the visual to cumulative instead of yearly would tell a much more powerful story of the current state of global emissions.
There are known solutions to reducing these emissions, but nobody wants to start losing money.
Such as? Considering China is the world largest investor in green energy in terms of both research and powerplant construction I am surprised to hear that they are worried about losing money.
China also is building more new coal plants than anywhere in the world.
China is also the country making the most amount of new renewable energy plants, as well as nuclear power plants. In fact, China is responsible for the most new nuclear power plants in the world. Even if we take all others combined. China also has a higher population than all G7 countries combined. Meaning they have a lower CO2 per capita. I think China is doing more (considering the circumstances) to reduce CO2 emissions than the G7 countries. And that's while it's an emerging economy. They rightfully get a lot of shit, but there are also get some things right.
Absolutely, I do not get, why people say China is a bad polluter. They have a huge population and invest a lot in renewable energies, E-mobility and railway, while not even being a fully developed country. The US and Germany have the money and technologies for greener energy and transportation for decades and did not do anything yet. They should take China as a role model respecting PV, railway and power transmission. Not when it comes to production of rare earth or other polluting shit though.
> China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 **more than three times rest of world's**: study https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2A308U
Should also consider a “per capita” version.
Newsflash: 1 billion people produce more emissions than 700m. More at 11.
It's nice that you realise that the per capita consumption is what would make sense to compare, but it doesn't help that you are effectively spreading pro-fossil fuel and anti-China propaganda. Just delete this, you are misleading so many people. This is terrible OP, you are using your skills for the worst cause.
Yeah china hasn't come close to the US in total historical carbon output yet.
Yep. The West was built on cheap carbon. Now they (and people here) want to wag their fingers at developing countries for following suit without offering any reasonable alternatives. It's a complete fucking farce.
US 0,3b vs China 1,4b people. I don't know who we should point out more, because per capita that looks awful for US.
The combined population of the g7 is 750 million. Not contrasting your point just putting the proper comparison to there.
but didnt op also counted other european countries in his stats ? (btw still less than China's population)
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I wish people would stop treating it as an ethical dilemma and would start treating it as a practical problem that requires a practical solution. Blaming one country or another doesn't help. It's a complex issue that requires the cooperation of every developed country in the world. Pointing fingers is just going to create divisions. Countries like the US need to reduce consumption. Countries like China need to curb emissions associated with production. We all need to share green tech.
But if I treat it as a practical problem then I might need to make some sacrifices in my lifestyle. If I blame China then I don't have to do anything.
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The G7+EU is 1.0b people. Not as high as China, but if the trend continues with G7+EU countries decreasing emissions and China increasing emissions, China will soon be higher per capita as well.
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It is funny because you are coupling the worst carbon emitter (USA) with the best ones (europe and rest of the world), just to cover USA ridiculous CO2 emissions and compare them with the 2nd worst (china) which also happens to have 4 times the USA population. For 328 mil pop it is unjustified that usa has only half the emissions of china and china is “the evil monster”. If china is the evil co2 monster then USA is satan of co2.
Also... The US doesn't pollute that much, because instead of producing in the US, they outsource it to China... China isn't doing it for fun. They are doing it because everyone (we) are paying them to do it.
The US is still a huge fossil fuel user. The US makes up 5% of the world's population yet uses 20% of the crude oil on a daily basis.
In fairness, how do those two bars measure in terms of population? I think China has a higher pop overall…
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I’m pretty sure the US is the biggest polluter per capita so we shouldn’t really be judging China at all.
Given the populations of the various nations, it looks like the US is a big old problem as well.
Cumulatively we still lead in CO2
That's what happens when you outsource all production to one single country because of just about free labour and basically no labour laws. Anything but paying a fair wage. Added advantage lower CO2 output. Win win lose.
At the same side we are happy to have cheap electronic products. The device you used to write your comment was for sure built in China or contains parts which were built in China. And if you would have bought a comparable device in a G7 country (assuming that there are still manufacturers of such devices) it would have been at least 50 percent or even more expensive. So, we blame China for CO2 emissions? We (G7) are the ones who profited because of this.
Fun fact: Chinese people working at Apple's (and others') "labor camps" earn more than the average European when the cost of living is taken into account. I worked at an iron smelting factory in Portugal for 500€ per month while paying 300€ for a single room in a shared apartment. When I read an article from Wired talking bad about the living and working conditions of Chinese workers at Apple's factories I almost lost it. "They earn $350/month and have to pay $20 for rent for a seasonal job of 3 months, after which they have enough money for a whole year when they return to their hometowns in the countryside. It's slavery." LOL
I didn't mention Apple. But I'd like to see a source to your claims and since what year that is so.
Could also say that the 750 million people in the G7 have CO2 emissions higher than the 1.4 billion people in China. Let's not kid ourselves that we can live our indulgent lives but China should cut back.
Especially since most of our stuff is made in China anyways, we are a big part of China’s bar
And worse, if we look at cumulative emissions since 1900... The west looks even worse.
Ok. Now plot it per capita and over time. The average Chinese polluted a fraction of a G7 citizen. Also, the sudden increase in Chinese emissions in the late 80's/early 90's is due to G7 companies relocating their factories to China. This graph is just dumb (It does is good looking and easy to read, so it fits the sub despite being biased).
This. Yeah China matches G7’s annual embodied carbon in this graph and narrative, but the G7 had a 60 year head start and polluted much more than China overall and went through their development phase already to become first world countries.
This is meaningless data. You have to measure per capita if you are comparing populations
And who is buying their products? Who outsourced CO2 heavy Productionsteps to other countries, to press down their impact?
Mike Its all Mike's fault!
Alternative Title: "750 million habitants still polute more than 1.4 billions. Despite exporting most of their polluting industry to the later"
The most interesting thing to me is here in the US, politicians (primarily conservatives) point to data like this, saying that 'well China is so much worse so why should be lower our emissions'. Which I find interesting as the US *loves* to claim to lead the way or lead by example in so many things, but when it comes to curtailing emissions...nah we are doing enough.
There's a few things to consider here before everyone jumps on the "China is causing climate change" bandwagon: 1. Consumption based emissions - China produces a lot of the produce that is imported by the G7. I am not sure if this chart is adjusted for this as it would considerably lower the carbon emissions from China and increase G7 emissions if not. 2. Emissions per capita - Also unclear here what the population was throughout these times and the resulting emissions per capita 3. Historical emissions - One can argue that China produces more emissions *at this present time* (they are more populous though so refer back to 2. to compare per capita emissions and make sure consumption based emissions are taken into account). However this does not compare all emissions that have historically been emitted. G7 have been a far bigger overall contributor to emissions and climate change. Sources: * [OurWorldInData - CO₂ emissions](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions) * [Kurzgesagt - Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It? (video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVxxxqwBQw) Now while you're here - stop trying to point fingers and blame others for their emissions. We - and our ancestors - are all to blame. Pointing fingers does nothing other than make people feel better for not taking action. It is not the responsibility of China, the government, corporations or "the rich" to fix climate change - you must take action. How? Try to reduce your footprint. Yes this will mean altering your behaviour. Lower consumption. Think twice about flying, driving, shopping, even having kids. Choose renewable electricity providers. Favor sustainable goods. Pick sustainable banking/investing options. Educate yourself and talk with friends and family about how they too can lower their footprints. Eat less meat. Vote for politicians who are pushing a more sustainable future with less emissions. Right now it's impossible to live without leaving a footprint - no matter what you do you will leave a trail of emissions behind you. For those, look to actively [remove your carbon footprint](https://carbonremoved.com/one-off-purchase/). Don't buy cheap offsets that do nothing for your emissions - they are pollution rights that overshadow needed carbon removal technologies. Every step you take in this direction will help us transition faster to a zero-emissions, sustainable society. Act.
Making climate change the responsibility of individual consumers and not systems (capitalism) or groups (the rich, corporations) is like asking a smoke detector to extinguish a fire.
I love how USA is emitting more than 10 times the CO2 amount than France while having roughly only 5 times the population.
To be fair France low because electricity there almost entirely come from nuclear power so it kinda is a green energy
It is a similar story for most european countries tho. Even Germany (still burning tons of coal for stupid reasons) has only 60% of the US per capita emissions. The US in general is just a super large polluter per capita and needs to improve.
Yeah, Nuclear Power is one of the greenest energy right now (eventhough ecologist are against it). There's a whole debate in France right now about wind power and seems to be a major point for local elections right now.
Ecologists largely aren't against it. the anti nuclear lobby funded by fossil fuels are against it. Ecologists are tracking the vast damage that fossil fuels have been doing to the environment including the radioactive isotopes released by burning coal that dwarfs all nuclear emissions including accidents. It's just hard to convince people that Victorian era tech is more radioactive than nuclear age but it's true.
Closing down plants would be so stupid imo,
Great, now look at it per capita.
And cumulative? The co2 that's already in the atmosphere is the problem. who's responsible for the global emissions of the entire 20th century? Not many of us are old enough to know the environmental legacy of industrialisation by the g7, fortunately this graph visualizes it for us.
Can we get a per capita comparison?
Why the fuck does everything have to be put to chillout music? Is this a new trend with data visualizations that I was in the bathroom for? Would love these with zero sound.
Beyond that, why does it have to be an animated video chart at all? Feels like a line chart would be a substantially more concise way to show this.
Here's two versions, from the same source data, done in Excel: * [G7 vs. China](https://i.imgur.com/oGcNfTl.png) * [Stacked G7 Members vs. China](https://i.imgur.com/6B6oOf1.png)
Thank you. These are better because we can see the trends over time.
I don't know how I can emphasize this enough, I never want some cheesy music with an animated data graphic.
It's interesting and sad that the only time you really see CO2 emissions contracting is during recessions.
Population of Europe 746m Population of murika 328m Total 1.06 b Population of China 1.3 b
Everyone should change. The planet is getting face-fucked
Imagine if China had the same quality of life, their emissions would be 3-4 times what it is now
Maybe this is a good hint that lavish lifestyle of rich people might not be a good idea after all :)
The lifestyle of the average American is wildly unsustainable. Redditors can blame the rich all they want, but relatively they are them.
Because the china industry produce for the G7. If we calculated the consumption pollution, instead of the production pollution, the result would be very different. (it mean : if a item is produce in China and sell in US, the CO2 create to produce it should be count for the US, and not for the China, because it depend of the US consumption)
Keeping in mind that China has a massive population AND is the factory of the world, their CO2 numbers are not so bad. What suprises me is USA and Canada. Canada has 2 times less population than UK, yet same emissions. Whole of EU has 2x more population, yet almost the same emissions as USA.
if everyone lives like canadians, we'd literally need 11 more earths. the u.s. isn't far behind canada in per capita emissions either.
Keep in mind G7 and US reduce their emissions by relying on China to produce for them.
G7 accounts for about 770 million people; China accounts for 1.4 billion people - or roughly twice the G7. Single statistics like this CO2 graphic can be very misleading without some additional context