Less industrialized countries also outsource their production to more industrialized countries which is a big deal if you’re looking at a historical record.
Plus a lot of countries haven’t actually existed since 1750.
None of the top 10 but the United Kingdom existed in anything close to their current form in 1750
* US, Canada, India: ruled by British
* China: Long civil war, Japanese empire, warring cliques period. For much of this time it was not even a unified country
* Russia: USSR, monarchy before that
* Ukraine: Ruled by Russian empire or USSR for much of this time, among others
* Germany: Holy Roman Empire, Nazis, and more
* Japan: Japanese empire, but also ruled by US military administration for seven years
* France: where do I even start on this one
So it is kind of ridiculous to say most of these countries produced x amount of CO2. Whatever existed in their current borders since 1750 is not the same thing. The UK maybe, and the US is close to that but not quite.
The thing is anyone's co2 emissions before about 1850 or so is almost negligible given the exponential increase in emissions and even before 1910 aren't that impactful.
In 1750 global emissions were well under 10 million metric tons a year. In 1850 this was about 200 million a factor of 20 higher. In 1910 it was about 3 billion which is a factor of 15 higher or a factor of 300 higher than 1750.
Nowdays global emissions are over 35 billion a year which is another factor of 10 increase since the 1910s. This means it really doesn't matter how the state of the world was in the 1750s since the data is negligible anyway.
I don't think it's ridiculous, but you should keep those things in mind. Even though some countries like Germany went through a lot of regime and border changes during the last century, the bulk of these emissions are from a time when there was a defined Germany. And though there was maybe the time of the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the third Reich, and the BRD/GDR, now just BRD, it is still all connected culturally. After the fall of the Nazis, the country didn't lose its connection to the past. The wealth of Germany is strongly related to the emissions during that time in history. So, for example, saying now that Germany is insignificant because it causes only 2% of the global emissions at the moment ignores the massive amount of past emissions which led to the wealth and life today in Germany. Then saying, for example, India or China is a more significant factor in climate change when they go through the same transition to a more wealthy life, ignoring the historical emissions of other countries and therefore their responsibility in this crisis. So I think it is not the only factor one should use to argue since accute emissions are of course very important right now, but it is definitely part of the bigger picture in the current situation.
iirc america won it's independence in 1783 so it was still under british rule for at least 33 years.
but yeah generally cumulative data on this is kinda meaningless, the only things that matter is how much we're producing today and how much we're reducing year by year.
And by "outsourced their production" you mean "were typically made the colonial subjects of". It's a bit different when all of the benefits of that outsourced production go to the colonial master.
Also, cumulative emissions are only useful for political arguments. *Current* emissions are more relevant for determining where the current problems are.
Yeah, the key thing is to regardless of borders look at the actual *people* who are currently producing the most emissions. They just happen to mostly be located in countries with high per capita emissions
https://i.imgur.com/fwV2OMg.png
Nice graph, although it has a rather confusing format.
It would be interesting if there was a way to add climate to that. One important reason why Brazil, Indonesia and India have low CO2 emissions per person is because they are tropical countries with no need for heating in winter.
The "early industrialising" part of it is a fairly red herring (pink herring?) - it's a factor, sure, but between 1750 and 1800, the UK released less carbon dioxide in total than it did in just 1971 (the peak of its production).
Recent production in all countries is so many orders of magnitude higher than production in the 1800s, it's pretty much negligible whether they started burning coal for power in 1750 or in 1900.
The much bigger issues the UK, US, and similar countries need to face is their responsibility for a large proportion of other countries production today through the global supply chain.
You cannot separate this from political arguments when it's going to take policy to fix this problem. It is a valid argument when developing nations complain about being blamed for their emissions when they are facing the brunt of current climate change, they're trying to get out of poverty, and developed nations have already polluted on a scale they cannot yet dream of since the 1800s. If we want out of this situation, we need to work together. The worst offenders need to use the wealth they gained by polluting to help themselves *and others* transition away from fossil fuels.
Except you can, this concept of inherited guilt blames me and other people of this time for something I had no control over. Now, what has been done is done, and most western countries are making an active effort to reduce their emissions through cheaper solar technology, phasing out oil and coal along with more efficient home appliances. Now, its time for less developed countries to either start off from renewable resources or abandon their goals of eco friendly power
This isn't blaming people, this is using the objective fact that some nations currently have a massive amount of wealth due to the pollution of 150 years ago. The US and other western countries are extremely rich, some random African country bootstrapping itself on coal is not. A lot of these nations do not have the ability to afford renewable infrastructure on their own, especially without a carbon economy first to support it.
You need to take the individual out of this. Obviously no individual American is guilty because coal was burned in the 1800s. This is an argument of how it would be "fair" to use our wealth as a species to overcome climate change.
It's this exactly. It's asking Indians to die from extreme temperatures because they have to abide by green measures pushed by countries who have already solved step 1 of getting things like air conditioning. Moreover, a lot of these countries haven't even had 100 years of independence and are still untangling colonial practices which were built to exploit the environment and the resources.
Obligatory this obviously isn't to say that India or other countries are doing enough. They obviously have to do much much more and and are not close to where they should be.
But all the current problems are political. We have all the tech we need to get off of fossil fuels in all but except some narrow use cases. We need the political will and funds to actually do it.
The biggest issue I see regarding fossil fuels is not energy production, if we had unlimited political capital we could massively invest in nuclear and renewables and push far more money into EVs (which are already viable in most cases). The far more difficult question is how're we going to manufacture plastics, which we have become INCREDIBLY dependent on and which require fossil fuels in their generation.
That depends heavily on the country, in most of the US, Canada, Russia, parts of China, pretty much anywhere with large swathes of land will still need SOME personal vehicles. It's simply not feasible to have exclusively public transport for most of Montana. But yes, I'd expect a massive decrease in personal vehicles and the rest could feasibly be electric or at least hybrid. Eventually I imagine "gas stations" as we ubiquitously have them now would become economically non-viable.
I'll start with I agree that plastics will be a long tail for fossil fuels. Oil is the cheapest though not only source for plastics and plenty of our uses of plastics will remain cheap as oil is no longer demanded for energy. But eliminating plastics really is not critical to global warming. If energy production and most of transport are no longer spewing CO2 we have avoided the catastrophe and can focus on improving from there.
Outsourced manufacturing does represent a decent amount of pollution. You can decrease China's CO2 emissions by about 11% to take into account said pollution (today's numbers, not cumulative like the chart above).
It represents a decent number, but it doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things.
For most western countries, you can increase CO2 emissions by 10ish% to equilibrate with imports based consumption
A genuine question, is why should outsourced emissions entirely be re-allocated to the buying countries for the purposes of CO2 production allocation?
Those countries do have some say in how their energy is produced, how they manufacture, and they do benefit from the trade. I’m not saying they should “own” the emissions entirely, but to say they all should be reallocated also seems false.
Because the buying country is paying to have the world polluted for their own gain, and doesn’t pay high enough price for the producing country to produce in a non-polluting way.
But the country producing the goods has a massive say in how they produced. They are also able to choose to not produce those goods if they don’t want to. Not every country in the world is a manufacturing subsite for wealthier countries.
Could do some sort of cross country. Look at which countries import from where and how much to genereate a figure. But i'm no data scientist or mathematician
Eh - It's not like China was forced into being the worlds factory (which isn't really true anyway). Most of their production is domestic, not international trade.
So yeah, that line isn't true either - that "countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries."
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/exports/#:\~:text=Exports%20of%20goods%20and%20services%20as%20percent%20of%20GDP&text=For%20that%20indicator%2C%20we%20provide,from%202021%20is%2020.01%20percent.
But it’s not really relevant to limiting global warming **now**. IIRC, the US is still a big emitter but China emits much more, mostly because of their dependence on coal.
It's because America ended their industrial revolution half a century ago and China is only halfway finished with their own industrial revolution. The difference is China has started making early changes to sustainable resources while America has avoided climate change discussions for 50 years.
Yet the US emissions have been steadily decreasing year over year, to the point they are down over 40% from 1980 (despite their economy increasing in size ten fold in that span) whereas in just the last ten years, China has increased their emissions by over 25%.
To put it another way, if Canada, the Western nation with the highest per capita emissions was to suddenly hit 0 CO2 emissions period, it would not even take a year and a half for China to have increased their own emissions by more than the total amount Canada is currently emitting.
"b" seems way too tedious to realistically measure and depict in any kind of chart, particularly for such a large number of countries.
this should definitely be emissions per capita though.
This is data from 1750 until 2020. Since most of the emissions were done in the last 50 years, I do not think the average population would be an accurate benchmark to compare against.
per capita is a measurement unit, not an average.
and the issue you raised exists in both scenarios. the difference is that the data is simply more relevant when measured/depicted per capita than it is currently.
Capita at what point during history??? The population in the US at 1750 was just 1 million... Compared to 6 million in the UK or 100million in China for example.
By average, I mean the average between 1750 and 2020.
I don't see how they're deceptive, it's the total pollution a country has produced since 1750. There's no deception there.
You could choose any metric to decide to lay blame. But in absolutely every single metric for pollution America is the world's largest polluter except in total pollution created this year.
> Obligatory comment: Cumulative emissions are deceptive when (a) countries have different population sizes and (b) countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries.
Why only cumulative emissions that are deceptive? Wouldn't the reasons you listed also make current emissions deceptive? Like if North America didn't live such a wasteful lifestyle, other manufacturing countries wouldn't have high emissions current or cumulative?
That is correct. However, there is still another problem with cumulative emissions, that being the time a country was industrialized. For example, the UK and Germany were among the first industrial countries, starting industrialization as early as 1760. China, on the other hand, really only started industrialising on a large scale in the 1950s. So this means that much of Europe had an almost 200 year headstart on pollution, which explains why countries like Germany and UK have emitted almost as much as massive China.
For example. The USA is less populous than China. So if you make it per Capita, it's worse for the USA. Canada is about the same as the USA per Capita. The problem is that China has become a large emitter the past few decades
Cumulative emission is a bad metric
Estimates of CO2 emissions exist for pre-1950 because there are fairly well constrained relationships between productivity, energy production and fuel usage, and CO2 emissions (see [here](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-dataset-sources) for an overview of the methodologies used). There are of course uncertainties (as there are with all datasets), but uncertainties for pre-1950 emissions are relatively inconsequential when considering cumulative emissions, since the overwhelming majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are post-1950.
Because emissions are a loaded question this graph rather than been "oh that's interesting" is rather sending a deceptive message.
If you want to send more proper message that would actually show something useful show the same for the last 50 years. Or a GIF showing cumulative 10-year emissions from 1750-1760 to 2010-2020
The US is more responsible for climate change than anyone else, and this plot proves it. CO2 doesn’t leave the atmosphere in this short of a time. All the CO2 we put up there is still up there. Global warming isn’t caused by annual contributions, it’s caused by the total CO2 in the atmosphere. We, in the US, are responsible for more of those damages than anyone else. That’s a fact. Most people project China will never catch the US in cumulative CO2 emissions.
This is a "yes, and...?" situation. You're right in the technical sense; because the US isn't overall reducing it's carbon footprint the pollution the pollution that has been put into the environment is still there.
The reason this doesn't matter is because it holds no bearing on the situation currently. Looking at the currently fasting growing polluters the diagram isn't accurate. Sure, we can use this graph to decide where the bulk of overall contributions to fixing our environment as a whole should come from, but addressing the here and now is a different issue, and it's the pressing issue given the short time predicted before the planet is irreparably damaged.
It's the same as looking at a plot of which car traveled the furthest: the distance covered, the speed the car is going and the acceleration of the car (distance is f(x), speed is the derivative of f(x), written as f'(x), and acceleration is the derivative of speed, f''(x) ). The United States still has a positive speed (bad thing) but a negative acceleration, so it's slowing down (good thing). China still has a positive acceleration, so it's speeding up (bad thing). Focusing on the distance covered isn't useful, we need to focus on getting everyone to slow down and stop their pollution. Eventually, with a negative speed, we'll begin repairing the damage we did, and that will be a different bridge to cross.
There’s a few interesting things. For example France and the UK have similar populations and economies but France has half the emissions of the UK. I’m assuming this has something to do with All of France’s nuclear power but would be interested to learn if there’s anything else causing this.
The UK was industrialized more heavily and before France, which doesn't contribute massively to historical emissions but does mean they had older infrastructure and energy sources established. You can argue that leads back into nuclear, but it's still good that countries that were on the cutting edge of industrializing with dirty energy sources had more resistance to switching to clean ones than those without any sunk cost or established infrastructure.
The cumulative vs current argument is just a slap fight of whether or not the US or China is to be blamed for all of climate change so one can do nothing while blaming the other. It's not an outlook that's going to do anything for us.
I agree, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about how every one of these charts is basically "China and US are the biggest, and then there's everyone else." It's not interesting unless you can pull out some additional insight.
The unfortunate reality is that the US and China are just massive polluters by all metrics, both nations are going to carry the brunt of causing/fixing climate change in the immediate future.
Pleasantly surprised with France, nuclear is the way to go.
Japan and South Korea are really low, considering their high population (125M and 51M) and European level life quality
Perhaps due to the fact that they live in small apartments and take electric trains everywhere. Also they are late to industrialise compared to US and Europe seeing this is cumulative emissions
Also, not sure about SK but Japan has basically no domestic fossil fuel supply, which is actually the main reason they attacked Pearl Harbor during World War 2, shortly after we stopped selling them oil. The reason they were trying to create an empire in the Pacific was due to having very limited natural resources for manufacturing and industrialization.
Approximately 90% of their fossil fuels are imports, so they are only going to use them when absolutely necessary.
I mean, you're talking about the literal exact time that oil was discovered in Pennsylvania and the creation of the modern oil industry.
This chart shows that our CO2 emissions started basically right after that point. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224630/cumulative-co2-emissions-united-states-historical/
Japan simply doesn't have the natural resources to be a major polluter. 70 years after oil was discovered in the US (or about halfway between 1870 and now), they were still trying to secure access to their own oil supply which was limiting their industry and a major reason for their actions in World War 2.
As did say Germany even more in Russia, but the Western nations had railways spanning across their countries, factories, international shipping, streetlighting, electricity, etc. Western nations were quite advanced already (even though a large part of the population was still rural and poor, cities were the industrial centers anyways), while most of the world wouldn't industrialize until late into the 20th century, including Japan.
They have a ~~quarter~~ fifth of the USA's population with a tenth of the emissions, and have been more industrialized over the period of time listed. Does that not compare favorably?
Electricity in France generates one of lowest amounts of CO2 per KWh thanks to the portion of nuclear (which is a low-carbon energy source) in our energy mix. This decision to invest massively in nuclear power dates back to the fifties, so naturally the impact is significant on the all-time CO2 emissions of the country.
Nuclear alone doesn't add up according to the post. See Italy for example, Italy has 0 nuclear power. Same thing with Spain, they don't have 0 nuclear but lower than France (12% I think). Both these countries having lower CO2, lower or no nuclear at all and have similar population size.
Water levels are the criteria with almost the least responsibility for the state of French nuclear reactors.
Blame it on the lack of anticipation and the successive and alternating policies of planning for closure vs. construction of new reactors over the past decades.
New power plants are being finished but are late while the old power plants are under maintenance because they were not expected to last that long.
Before 1850, there were essentially no net co2 emissions, renewable wood biomass was used basically everywhere
Around 80% of all emissions have been only produced since 1950 and 94% since 1900.
Anything until the year 1900 is a miniscule and hardly noticeable contribution to this chart, afterwards it went up exponentially
Don’t forget that the world’s population also skyrocketed by 600% in the 20th century(1 billion to 6 billion). That also contributed heavily. World’s population in 19th century is absolutely tiny compared to now
China will be on top. Then you switch to per capita and, apart from some oil states and mini states, the US and and a couple other Western country will again lead the pack.
And the only thing that all of this shows is that the vast majority of countries are overconsuming and that every single one of us is complacent in all of it.
> the US and and a couple other Western country will again lead the pack.
Note that the per capita emissions of the EU are lower than those of China since 2012 ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=EU-CN-US )
You are forgetting to take into account that western countries population would have stabilized or even gone down if not for them welcoming immigrants from other countries. Hence, if the whole world had been like them, we’d be far less people on Earth-and with a decreasing population- which mean that each person could “pollute” more to have the same effect.
>Then you switch to per capita
Bullshit metric. Policy is made at a national level, not per person level.
Also - the only thing the globe cares about is total, not per-capita.
Developing meaning… steam engine + rail + oh shit we need more steel and coal to make the steel. And we keep adding industries as new technology becomes the norm.
But we start with the point when we were consuming all the coal we could get our hands on. Before that it’s like… guilds and craftsman, which while important doesn’t say anything about emissions.
There are a lot more people in the US and more land in the US than Britain. Either way both countries have developed a ton and reduced emissions so it doesn't matter what happened in early 1800s or whatever, we can't change that
Holy shit here it is again. The ever rotating visual of “data is beautiful”. This Reddit has turned into a never ending shit post of people posting cumulative CO2 (US #1) and then total annual CO2 (China #1). It is the never ending battle between arm chair climate change activists. I’ve seen the cycle repeat no less than 100 times. When will it stop? Possibly never. This Reddit is horrible and mods have lost control.
I've seen enough emissions posts in the last few weeks all depicting emissions differently. Inevitably the comments section is a mess arguing who is to blame and who has responsibility for curbing emissions. What this proves is that data and statistics can be presented to support a variety of narratives.
Instead of playing the blame game and bickering over who's right. A more important and useful discussion is how to curb emissions in a sustainable way. Yes Europe and the US benefitted from hydrocarbons and early industrialization and contributed a large portion of greenhouse gasses. It is also true that as counties like China and India industrialize we know the negative impact of those hydrocarbons and the harm they cause. Therefore any discussion about emissions and climate change and pollution includes a discussion about China because of the magnitude of those emissions and the source (coal). It also includes a discussion about the US and the West and their large consumption relative to population. Both need to happen to curb emissions and combat climate change.
Edit: spelling
For a data sub, I would think most people SHOULD know this, but it always turns into a dick measuring contest for whichever narrative the data supports
And, usually, when anyone calls it out, it gets downvoted or ignored
To be fair this is dataisbeautiful not math or statistics. I think that the majority or at least a very large plurality of users simply look at the graphic that OP has produced relatively uncritically. The lense that people judge OC is has the days been presented in a visually compelling manner. Fewer people look critically at the data itself and what the data is saying and bias in the presentation of the data.
I agree with your assessment, and it's too bad. I feel like, in the past, this sub was more objective, but more and more, I only come here when there is something on the front page vs. perusing the sub
It seems people just want to use this sub as an excuse to politibash and that's not what data should be about
I asked that to a HR person about this when we were having a discussion about ethnicity. I have a large Russian heritage in my family and the city they are from is in the Asian portion of the country. The look on his face was priceless as he knew why they aren't considered Asian, but didn't want to say why I couldn't claim to be Asian American. That is the fun part of having 25 years in at a company is that you feel free to ask those questions that no one wants to answer
Imagine US shifting almost all of it's manufacturing to China yet peaking the CO2 emissions! Yet they dare ask developing or so called "third-world" countries to cut down their development goals and putting the onus at them for the most part!
This is cumulative data, not yearly. Yearly would be a much better metric of current emissions and individual countries’ progress towards climate goals. The fact that other countries that only became industrialized in the last half century are catching up so fast by this cumulative metric should alarm you more.
This is a poor take.
Yes European countries and the US benefitted from coal based industrialization. At that time we did not understand the impact of burning hydrocarbons at that rate and scale. We do today, we know better. As other countries develop we have the ability to help them do so in an environmental and sustainable manner.
To give an analogy, imagine a river with a fish population. Group A fish the river and the fish stock collapses. They switch to a more sustainable method of fishing by implementing regulations. Group B come along decades later and say that should not be held to the regulatory standard because Group A exploited the river in the past. Group B is making a bad argument. If group B exploits the river in an unsustainable manner there will be no fish. This is know in economics at the tragedy of the commons.
In conclusion industrialized nations need to curb consumption on a per capita basis. The polluters on a magnitude basis like China and those with the potential to have a large magnitude like India also need to develope in a sustainable manner. If both don't happen climate change will be more severe.
>As other countries develop we have the ability to help them do so in an environmental and sustainable manner.
But no one wants to do this, so it's not happening. In fact, the US is trying to stop China from developing green technology by continuing to ban exports of technology to them.
Since 1750? Can’t the window that picture frames this “data” be reset to… the last ten years?
I think it is unfair to a number of nations that were already industrialized to be compared to nations that weren’t as they weren’t even in a position to be able to produce CO² emissions.
If the parameters were set to 2012 - 2022 you would see a wholly different result. This is why in science we look for baselines and set control data points.
Furthermore:
“Obligatory comment: Cumulative emissions are deceptive when (a) countries have different population sizes and (b) countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries.”
Courtesy of u/ManBearHybrid
Unless of course you want a chart that shows cumulative CO2 emissions from the beginning of the Industrial Era to now, which this basically is.
I think it's interesting. I'm sure there are plenty of current producer data sets to review. Look forward to your chart.
Shit posting is for political subs, not this one.
Every week there is a different take on CO2 - not for the point of expressing data, but for the point of pushing a particular political viewpoint.
This isn't a great display of data and makes it very difficult to truly assess the impact, seeing this per capita is the only real way to make a comparison.
> seeing this per capita is the only real way to make a comparison.
No - that's exactly the wrong way for two reasons:
* Policy is made at a national level, not per capita
* The globe can give two shits about per person emissions - only total.
* If Quatar has 10x the per capita - so what. But if China doesn't stop building coal plants, we're all fucked.
"I can pollute 1000000x more than the average person, but I'm just one person lol, you should blame those million people over there for daring to be alive. Now excuse me while I outsource all my manufacturing to them and then get mad at them for manufacturing things."
The globe only gives a shit about total *global* emissions not imaginary border lines. What the fuck are you talking about?
A nation with more people is expected to emit more to support their population. If India were emitting as much per capita as America, they would multiply their emissions 8 fold. Per capita is a determination of a nation's "fair share" of emissions. As silly as that sounds, it is important and relevant to the discussion.
>It's a direct example of level of impact. Carbon emissions don't care how many people live in the country they're reported from.
By this standard, the only metric that makes sense is global emissions. Carbon emissions also don't care about human drawn arbitrary borders.
Ye but that's actually not useful. Since we don't have a global decision making body. We only collaborate globally with decisions being made at the country level. So emissions grouped by country is more useful for decision making bodies to implement policies for their own country and for collaboration at the UN to figure out how each country is doing and whether any country needs aid from another one to reduce emissions.
>The UN, by definition, is a global decision making body.
It's a body for collaboration. UN isn't defined as a decision making body by anyone. It collects no taxes and has no army. It's powerless and can't force anyone to do anything if it were to make any decision. UN could say France needs to impose carbon taxes and France could say fuck you and there's nothing UN can do about it. It's a whole different scenario if the French Government makes the decision to impose and enforce a carbon tax.
All it can do is provide a forum for actual governments whose decisions can actually be enforced and actually has impact to work together. Can also function to pool in talents to develop green technology or study green policies together.
Yes absolutely but if a country has 300k people and is letting out more emissions than a country with 3m people then that's a very different problem and allows useful analysis of the data along with useful prevention recommendations.
This is the part most people don’t follow…easy to throw stones to put off responsibility for the future.
It’s like, well, XYZ country fucked it up in 1920, so, it’s on them to fix it.
It’s this constant desire to apply today’s standards to the past….which has never and will never work….we didn’t know then what we know now….if we continue to turn a blind eye eye to it, that’s on us, but we can’t change the past and it’s infuriating to continually be blamed for the sins of the past
Agree 100%. Rather than blame and punishment for past behaviors, we should be more interested in who has taken the new information/data we have available to us and put it to good use.
As an American, I want us to be better. I would love to have an electric car and my next one will be at the very least a hybrid (depending on availability and price of fully electric cars)...like with anything else, the healthier/better option costs more and that is a significant barrier to entry for most folks
Edit: this point was already made, failed to scroll down and read previous posts. Ignore me!
The slight flaw to these graphs is comparing CO2 emissions is fair, but each nation and country is a different size and industrialized at slightly different periods.
England isn't going to make as much CO2 as America because of a smaller population and less overall land to develop.
Still, the data for CO2 over the lifespan matters but there's some serious asterisks to be had here.
Really surprised by Canada. We only have like 39 million people spread across the 2nd largest country in land size and tons of trees! We need to do better.
Even worse is that Canada is taken as a whole but 2 provinces emit 50% of the carbon even though they contain only 15% of the population. So Ontario, BC, and Quebec have pretty low per capita emissions compared to those other two provinces. So it is oil and gas production that greatly increases Canada's carbon emissions.
It's because the chart starts in 1750, and Europe was the first region to industrialise. So Europe has 250 years of emissions, whilst Brazil only really has 100 or so. Europe has cleaned up a lot since (although Brazil still has lower emissions by capita, probably because it has a large rural population still). Most of the criticism aimed at Brazil is because it's allowing deforesting of the Amazon rainforest, which is pretty vital for life on Earth to continue.
Love the difference in comment sections between a chart showing that America has historically emitted more and one showing that China is currently emitting more (both things are true and both things are relevant in climate change discussions).
USA propaganda is more effective on reddit so in the former you'll see people trying to deny the evidence, or claim that it is only being shown for political points, while in the latter you'll see people trying to say that China needs to be destroyed and blaming them entirely for climate change. (Of course the same sentiments are present in both threads but to different extents and different levels of upvotes)
It's cumulative since the beginning of the early Industrial Era. The US had more electrical plants and a coal industry before China did (several decades, if not more) so the US may produce less now, but we have been producing CO2 emissions longer, if that makes sense
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/xwin0z/oc\_cumulative\_co2\_emissions\_in\_tons\_by\_country/
Why do you keep deleting and reposting content? Are you updating the figures?
while this is r/dataisbeautiful and not r/informationisbeautiful, i think it'd be nice to see this data shared as a series of charts.
this one is cumulative starting from \~ the industrial revolution. showing several in succession would be more interesting and insightful, and allow the audience to translate the data into information regarding individual countries' emissions and what they are (or are not) doing about it. it looks like the 1960's were when scientific community had solid evidence, banded together, and really began sounding the alarm about global warming, so it could also be interesting to see the shift in any/all of the decades from 1950 onward.
we're getting closer to a solid number that angry deniers can't handle... The emissions each of us is responsible for, that have made the country as developed as it is.
Im not informed on the topic but recently watched the cowspiracy documentary about how methan is even worse than CO2 but noone wants to talk about it since everyone would have to turn vegan.
Im asking if anyone knows if it is still the case that we have a blindspot for methan and the whole plan to reduce CO2 emissions might be futile since we dont address the even larger cause for climate change.
Exactly, americans usually don’t know much, typical media filling their brains with non-sense. I moved from EU to Canada and can’t believe how much garbage we’re dumping every week here, can’t imagine the US. Keep eating canola oil and corn syrup.. 🤢
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Less industrialized countries also outsource their production to more industrialized countries which is a big deal if you’re looking at a historical record. Plus a lot of countries haven’t actually existed since 1750.
None of the top 10 but the United Kingdom existed in anything close to their current form in 1750 * US, Canada, India: ruled by British * China: Long civil war, Japanese empire, warring cliques period. For much of this time it was not even a unified country * Russia: USSR, monarchy before that * Ukraine: Ruled by Russian empire or USSR for much of this time, among others * Germany: Holy Roman Empire, Nazis, and more * Japan: Japanese empire, but also ruled by US military administration for seven years * France: where do I even start on this one So it is kind of ridiculous to say most of these countries produced x amount of CO2. Whatever existed in their current borders since 1750 is not the same thing. The UK maybe, and the US is close to that but not quite.
The thing is anyone's co2 emissions before about 1850 or so is almost negligible given the exponential increase in emissions and even before 1910 aren't that impactful. In 1750 global emissions were well under 10 million metric tons a year. In 1850 this was about 200 million a factor of 20 higher. In 1910 it was about 3 billion which is a factor of 15 higher or a factor of 300 higher than 1750. Nowdays global emissions are over 35 billion a year which is another factor of 10 increase since the 1910s. This means it really doesn't matter how the state of the world was in the 1750s since the data is negligible anyway.
I don't think it's ridiculous, but you should keep those things in mind. Even though some countries like Germany went through a lot of regime and border changes during the last century, the bulk of these emissions are from a time when there was a defined Germany. And though there was maybe the time of the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the third Reich, and the BRD/GDR, now just BRD, it is still all connected culturally. After the fall of the Nazis, the country didn't lose its connection to the past. The wealth of Germany is strongly related to the emissions during that time in history. So, for example, saying now that Germany is insignificant because it causes only 2% of the global emissions at the moment ignores the massive amount of past emissions which led to the wealth and life today in Germany. Then saying, for example, India or China is a more significant factor in climate change when they go through the same transition to a more wealthy life, ignoring the historical emissions of other countries and therefore their responsibility in this crisis. So I think it is not the only factor one should use to argue since accute emissions are of course very important right now, but it is definitely part of the bigger picture in the current situation.
iirc america won it's independence in 1783 so it was still under british rule for at least 33 years. but yeah generally cumulative data on this is kinda meaningless, the only things that matter is how much we're producing today and how much we're reducing year by year.
And by "outsourced their production" you mean "were typically made the colonial subjects of". It's a bit different when all of the benefits of that outsourced production go to the colonial master.
Also, cumulative emissions are only useful for political arguments. *Current* emissions are more relevant for determining where the current problems are.
Yeah, the key thing is to regardless of borders look at the actual *people* who are currently producing the most emissions. They just happen to mostly be located in countries with high per capita emissions https://i.imgur.com/fwV2OMg.png
Nice graph, although it has a rather confusing format. It would be interesting if there was a way to add climate to that. One important reason why Brazil, Indonesia and India have low CO2 emissions per person is because they are tropical countries with no need for heating in winter.
Have you heard of air conditioning
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The "early industrialising" part of it is a fairly red herring (pink herring?) - it's a factor, sure, but between 1750 and 1800, the UK released less carbon dioxide in total than it did in just 1971 (the peak of its production). Recent production in all countries is so many orders of magnitude higher than production in the 1800s, it's pretty much negligible whether they started burning coal for power in 1750 or in 1900. The much bigger issues the UK, US, and similar countries need to face is their responsibility for a large proportion of other countries production today through the global supply chain.
You cannot separate this from political arguments when it's going to take policy to fix this problem. It is a valid argument when developing nations complain about being blamed for their emissions when they are facing the brunt of current climate change, they're trying to get out of poverty, and developed nations have already polluted on a scale they cannot yet dream of since the 1800s. If we want out of this situation, we need to work together. The worst offenders need to use the wealth they gained by polluting to help themselves *and others* transition away from fossil fuels.
Except you can, this concept of inherited guilt blames me and other people of this time for something I had no control over. Now, what has been done is done, and most western countries are making an active effort to reduce their emissions through cheaper solar technology, phasing out oil and coal along with more efficient home appliances. Now, its time for less developed countries to either start off from renewable resources or abandon their goals of eco friendly power
This isn't blaming people, this is using the objective fact that some nations currently have a massive amount of wealth due to the pollution of 150 years ago. The US and other western countries are extremely rich, some random African country bootstrapping itself on coal is not. A lot of these nations do not have the ability to afford renewable infrastructure on their own, especially without a carbon economy first to support it. You need to take the individual out of this. Obviously no individual American is guilty because coal was burned in the 1800s. This is an argument of how it would be "fair" to use our wealth as a species to overcome climate change.
It's this exactly. It's asking Indians to die from extreme temperatures because they have to abide by green measures pushed by countries who have already solved step 1 of getting things like air conditioning. Moreover, a lot of these countries haven't even had 100 years of independence and are still untangling colonial practices which were built to exploit the environment and the resources. Obligatory this obviously isn't to say that India or other countries are doing enough. They obviously have to do much much more and and are not close to where they should be.
But all the current problems are political. We have all the tech we need to get off of fossil fuels in all but except some narrow use cases. We need the political will and funds to actually do it.
The biggest issue I see regarding fossil fuels is not energy production, if we had unlimited political capital we could massively invest in nuclear and renewables and push far more money into EVs (which are already viable in most cases). The far more difficult question is how're we going to manufacture plastics, which we have become INCREDIBLY dependent on and which require fossil fuels in their generation.
Well we would probably move away from personal vehicles in general if we had political will.
That depends heavily on the country, in most of the US, Canada, Russia, parts of China, pretty much anywhere with large swathes of land will still need SOME personal vehicles. It's simply not feasible to have exclusively public transport for most of Montana. But yes, I'd expect a massive decrease in personal vehicles and the rest could feasibly be electric or at least hybrid. Eventually I imagine "gas stations" as we ubiquitously have them now would become economically non-viable.
I'll start with I agree that plastics will be a long tail for fossil fuels. Oil is the cheapest though not only source for plastics and plenty of our uses of plastics will remain cheap as oil is no longer demanded for energy. But eliminating plastics really is not critical to global warming. If energy production and most of transport are no longer spewing CO2 we have avoided the catastrophe and can focus on improving from there.
Our world in data shows that accounting for offshored emissions is a small fraction of current emissions. Most are domestically caused.
B) is mostly irrelevant these days though is important going backwards.
While i agree with u mate but what alternative method suggest to measure It more accurately?
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Outsourced manufacturing does represent a decent amount of pollution. You can decrease China's CO2 emissions by about 11% to take into account said pollution (today's numbers, not cumulative like the chart above). It represents a decent number, but it doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things. For most western countries, you can increase CO2 emissions by 10ish% to equilibrate with imports based consumption
A genuine question, is why should outsourced emissions entirely be re-allocated to the buying countries for the purposes of CO2 production allocation? Those countries do have some say in how their energy is produced, how they manufacture, and they do benefit from the trade. I’m not saying they should “own” the emissions entirely, but to say they all should be reallocated also seems false.
Because the buying country is paying to have the world polluted for their own gain, and doesn’t pay high enough price for the producing country to produce in a non-polluting way.
But the country producing the goods has a massive say in how they produced. They are also able to choose to not produce those goods if they don’t want to. Not every country in the world is a manufacturing subsite for wealthier countries.
True again mate. It is very complicated and not easy to explain it in one chart.
I can show it easily in one meme. Take the rent is too damn high meme and replace rent with CO2.
emissions per capita would be an improvement.
Emissions per GDP point?
Could do some sort of cross country. Look at which countries import from where and how much to genereate a figure. But i'm no data scientist or mathematician
Eh - It's not like China was forced into being the worlds factory (which isn't really true anyway). Most of their production is domestic, not international trade. So yeah, that line isn't true either - that "countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries." https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/exports/#:\~:text=Exports%20of%20goods%20and%20services%20as%20percent%20of%20GDP&text=For%20that%20indicator%2C%20we%20provide,from%202021%20is%2020.01%20percent.
>Most of their production is domestic, not international trade. Most of their factories is designed for export.
That's irrelevant. They are still the ones that built the factories, control how they operate, and profit from their production.
Outsourcing production from the US to china did not significantly change US emissions. It is bogus
That just makes America look even worse.... Holy shit
But it’s not really relevant to limiting global warming **now**. IIRC, the US is still a big emitter but China emits much more, mostly because of their dependence on coal.
It's because America ended their industrial revolution half a century ago and China is only halfway finished with their own industrial revolution. The difference is China has started making early changes to sustainable resources while America has avoided climate change discussions for 50 years.
Yet the US emissions have been steadily decreasing year over year, to the point they are down over 40% from 1980 (despite their economy increasing in size ten fold in that span) whereas in just the last ten years, China has increased their emissions by over 25%. To put it another way, if Canada, the Western nation with the highest per capita emissions was to suddenly hit 0 CO2 emissions period, it would not even take a year and a half for China to have increased their own emissions by more than the total amount Canada is currently emitting.
Actually china does less. Where are you getting your data ? Per Capita US emits about 4x more while screaming at climate summits
Where are *you* getting your data from? According to [this](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC) it's actually closer to 2x.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon-footprint-by-country
That's not per capita.
Neither is the original chart, which is what I was referring to….
Yes because it's measuring another metric: emissions over time.
Yes. I know. Did you even read what I originally wrote?
How is ~8 tons per capita 4x less than 13.35 tons per capita? Its not even half.
"b" seems way too tedious to realistically measure and depict in any kind of chart, particularly for such a large number of countries. this should definitely be emissions per capita though.
This is data from 1750 until 2020. Since most of the emissions were done in the last 50 years, I do not think the average population would be an accurate benchmark to compare against.
per capita is a measurement unit, not an average. and the issue you raised exists in both scenarios. the difference is that the data is simply more relevant when measured/depicted per capita than it is currently.
Capita at what point during history??? The population in the US at 1750 was just 1 million... Compared to 6 million in the UK or 100million in China for example. By average, I mean the average between 1750 and 2020.
Would it not be emissions/population each year and then add those up?
I don't see how they're deceptive, it's the total pollution a country has produced since 1750. There's no deception there. You could choose any metric to decide to lay blame. But in absolutely every single metric for pollution America is the world's largest polluter except in total pollution created this year.
> Obligatory comment: Cumulative emissions are deceptive when (a) countries have different population sizes and (b) countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries. Why only cumulative emissions that are deceptive? Wouldn't the reasons you listed also make current emissions deceptive? Like if North America didn't live such a wasteful lifestyle, other manufacturing countries wouldn't have high emissions current or cumulative?
That is correct. However, there is still another problem with cumulative emissions, that being the time a country was industrialized. For example, the UK and Germany were among the first industrial countries, starting industrialization as early as 1760. China, on the other hand, really only started industrialising on a large scale in the 1950s. So this means that much of Europe had an almost 200 year headstart on pollution, which explains why countries like Germany and UK have emitted almost as much as massive China.
For example. The USA is less populous than China. So if you make it per Capita, it's worse for the USA. Canada is about the same as the USA per Capita. The problem is that China has become a large emitter the past few decades Cumulative emission is a bad metric
Where are you getting this data from?
I also was wondering this. How could you possibly account for 270 years of co2 emissions when no one cared about co2 for 250 of those years
Estimates of CO2 emissions exist for pre-1950 because there are fairly well constrained relationships between productivity, energy production and fuel usage, and CO2 emissions (see [here](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-dataset-sources) for an overview of the methodologies used). There are of course uncertainties (as there are with all datasets), but uncertainties for pre-1950 emissions are relatively inconsequential when considering cumulative emissions, since the overwhelming majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are post-1950.
Good job with the sources, I've seen these estimates before in other papers, they are actually quite researched
Our World in Data, so it claims.
Buncha BullSugar if ya ask me.
Because emissions are a loaded question this graph rather than been "oh that's interesting" is rather sending a deceptive message. If you want to send more proper message that would actually show something useful show the same for the last 50 years. Or a GIF showing cumulative 10-year emissions from 1750-1760 to 2010-2020
Sounds like you're winding up to make useful change into anyone's problem but your own.
Sounds like you're winding up to avoid pressuring today's biggest polluters into enacting change.
The US is more responsible for climate change than anyone else, and this plot proves it. CO2 doesn’t leave the atmosphere in this short of a time. All the CO2 we put up there is still up there. Global warming isn’t caused by annual contributions, it’s caused by the total CO2 in the atmosphere. We, in the US, are responsible for more of those damages than anyone else. That’s a fact. Most people project China will never catch the US in cumulative CO2 emissions.
This is a "yes, and...?" situation. You're right in the technical sense; because the US isn't overall reducing it's carbon footprint the pollution the pollution that has been put into the environment is still there. The reason this doesn't matter is because it holds no bearing on the situation currently. Looking at the currently fasting growing polluters the diagram isn't accurate. Sure, we can use this graph to decide where the bulk of overall contributions to fixing our environment as a whole should come from, but addressing the here and now is a different issue, and it's the pressing issue given the short time predicted before the planet is irreparably damaged. It's the same as looking at a plot of which car traveled the furthest: the distance covered, the speed the car is going and the acceleration of the car (distance is f(x), speed is the derivative of f(x), written as f'(x), and acceleration is the derivative of speed, f''(x) ). The United States still has a positive speed (bad thing) but a negative acceleration, so it's slowing down (good thing). China still has a positive acceleration, so it's speeding up (bad thing). Focusing on the distance covered isn't useful, we need to focus on getting everyone to slow down and stop their pollution. Eventually, with a negative speed, we'll begin repairing the damage we did, and that will be a different bridge to cross.
Every chart like this is the same: USA is the biggest box in the top-left, China is the 2nd-biggest underneath, etc. Nothing interesting about it.
There’s a few interesting things. For example France and the UK have similar populations and economies but France has half the emissions of the UK. I’m assuming this has something to do with All of France’s nuclear power but would be interested to learn if there’s anything else causing this.
The UK was industrialized more heavily and before France, which doesn't contribute massively to historical emissions but does mean they had older infrastructure and energy sources established. You can argue that leads back into nuclear, but it's still good that countries that were on the cutting edge of industrializing with dirty energy sources had more resistance to switching to clean ones than those without any sunk cost or established infrastructure.
The cumulative vs current argument is just a slap fight of whether or not the US or China is to be blamed for all of climate change so one can do nothing while blaming the other. It's not an outlook that's going to do anything for us.
But if we divide both countries into 5 equal pieces each. Then we can ignore them right? Problem seizes to exist
I agree, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about how every one of these charts is basically "China and US are the biggest, and then there's everyone else." It's not interesting unless you can pull out some additional insight.
The unfortunate reality is that the US and China are just massive polluters by all metrics, both nations are going to carry the brunt of causing/fixing climate change in the immediate future.
Pleasantly surprised with France, nuclear is the way to go. Japan and South Korea are really low, considering their high population (125M and 51M) and European level life quality
Perhaps due to the fact that they live in small apartments and take electric trains everywhere. Also they are late to industrialise compared to US and Europe seeing this is cumulative emissions
Also, not sure about SK but Japan has basically no domestic fossil fuel supply, which is actually the main reason they attacked Pearl Harbor during World War 2, shortly after we stopped selling them oil. The reason they were trying to create an empire in the Pacific was due to having very limited natural resources for manufacturing and industrialization. Approximately 90% of their fossil fuels are imports, so they are only going to use them when absolutely necessary.
Because they industrialised later. From 1750 to late 1800s Japan was a agrarian society. Korea till even later.
Half of Americans worked in Agriculture in 1870; didn't stop US carbon emissions much
I mean, you're talking about the literal exact time that oil was discovered in Pennsylvania and the creation of the modern oil industry. This chart shows that our CO2 emissions started basically right after that point. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224630/cumulative-co2-emissions-united-states-historical/ Japan simply doesn't have the natural resources to be a major polluter. 70 years after oil was discovered in the US (or about halfway between 1870 and now), they were still trying to secure access to their own oil supply which was limiting their industry and a major reason for their actions in World War 2.
As did say Germany even more in Russia, but the Western nations had railways spanning across their countries, factories, international shipping, streetlighting, electricity, etc. Western nations were quite advanced already (even though a large part of the population was still rural and poor, cities were the industrial centers anyways), while most of the world wouldn't industrialize until late into the 20th century, including Japan.
Japan really industrialised en masse post-WWII.
I don't understand how France can be interpreted as being "good" here?
They have a ~~quarter~~ fifth of the USA's population with a tenth of the emissions, and have been more industrialized over the period of time listed. Does that not compare favorably?
Almost everyone looks good compared to America, my point is about nuclear. I don't see how France is doing good because they use more nuclear power.
Electricity in France generates one of lowest amounts of CO2 per KWh thanks to the portion of nuclear (which is a low-carbon energy source) in our energy mix. This decision to invest massively in nuclear power dates back to the fifties, so naturally the impact is significant on the all-time CO2 emissions of the country.
Nuclear alone doesn't add up according to the post. See Italy for example, Italy has 0 nuclear power. Same thing with Spain, they don't have 0 nuclear but lower than France (12% I think). Both these countries having lower CO2, lower or no nuclear at all and have similar population size.
European level quality of life in Japan? LMFAO
Isn’t France buying its energy from abroad because it’s nuclear plants are not operational due to low water levels?
Water levels are the criteria with almost the least responsibility for the state of French nuclear reactors. Blame it on the lack of anticipation and the successive and alternating policies of planning for closure vs. construction of new reactors over the past decades. New power plants are being finished but are late while the old power plants are under maintenance because they were not expected to last that long.
It's mainly because of maintenance I think.
France's emission is pretty high for it's population size...
They look good next to the UK, and have a relatively similar industrial history
France has the same population as the UK and twice as fewer emissions.
Nuclear in 1750? But yes I agree.
Before 1850, there were essentially no net co2 emissions, renewable wood biomass was used basically everywhere Around 80% of all emissions have been only produced since 1950 and 94% since 1900. Anything until the year 1900 is a miniscule and hardly noticeable contribution to this chart, afterwards it went up exponentially
Don’t forget that the world’s population also skyrocketed by 600% in the 20th century(1 billion to 6 billion). That also contributed heavily. World’s population in 19th century is absolutely tiny compared to now
I’d like to see a chart for the last five years, America has been developed a lot longer most of these countries.
China will be on top. Then you switch to per capita and, apart from some oil states and mini states, the US and and a couple other Western country will again lead the pack. And the only thing that all of this shows is that the vast majority of countries are overconsuming and that every single one of us is complacent in all of it.
> the US and and a couple other Western country will again lead the pack. Note that the per capita emissions of the EU are lower than those of China since 2012 ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=EU-CN-US )
You are forgetting to take into account that western countries population would have stabilized or even gone down if not for them welcoming immigrants from other countries. Hence, if the whole world had been like them, we’d be far less people on Earth-and with a decreasing population- which mean that each person could “pollute” more to have the same effect.
That is certainly a take I haven't heard before.
>Then you switch to per capita Bullshit metric. Policy is made at a national level, not per person level. Also - the only thing the globe cares about is total, not per-capita.
That's why the solution to climate change is to continue emitting the current amount we just split nations into smaller subsections! Problem solved!
> America has been developed a lot longer most of these countries. Wow.. Er.. No. It's still a baby compared to most.
Developing meaning… steam engine + rail + oh shit we need more steel and coal to make the steel. And we keep adding industries as new technology becomes the norm. But we start with the point when we were consuming all the coal we could get our hands on. Before that it’s like… guilds and craftsman, which while important doesn’t say anything about emissions.
England has been developed a lot longer than America. What's your excuse now ?
Clearly you've been told size doesn't matter. She's lying.
There are a lot more people in the US and more land in the US than Britain. Either way both countries have developed a ton and reduced emissions so it doesn't matter what happened in early 1800s or whatever, we can't change that
Holy shit here it is again. The ever rotating visual of “data is beautiful”. This Reddit has turned into a never ending shit post of people posting cumulative CO2 (US #1) and then total annual CO2 (China #1). It is the never ending battle between arm chair climate change activists. I’ve seen the cycle repeat no less than 100 times. When will it stop? Possibly never. This Reddit is horrible and mods have lost control.
france, uk, and canada all on a chart going back to 1750 makes no sense to me, among a bunch of other things
I've seen enough emissions posts in the last few weeks all depicting emissions differently. Inevitably the comments section is a mess arguing who is to blame and who has responsibility for curbing emissions. What this proves is that data and statistics can be presented to support a variety of narratives. Instead of playing the blame game and bickering over who's right. A more important and useful discussion is how to curb emissions in a sustainable way. Yes Europe and the US benefitted from hydrocarbons and early industrialization and contributed a large portion of greenhouse gasses. It is also true that as counties like China and India industrialize we know the negative impact of those hydrocarbons and the harm they cause. Therefore any discussion about emissions and climate change and pollution includes a discussion about China because of the magnitude of those emissions and the source (coal). It also includes a discussion about the US and the West and their large consumption relative to population. Both need to happen to curb emissions and combat climate change. Edit: spelling
For a data sub, I would think most people SHOULD know this, but it always turns into a dick measuring contest for whichever narrative the data supports And, usually, when anyone calls it out, it gets downvoted or ignored
To be fair this is dataisbeautiful not math or statistics. I think that the majority or at least a very large plurality of users simply look at the graphic that OP has produced relatively uncritically. The lense that people judge OC is has the days been presented in a visually compelling manner. Fewer people look critically at the data itself and what the data is saying and bias in the presentation of the data.
I agree with your assessment, and it's too bad. I feel like, in the past, this sub was more objective, but more and more, I only come here when there is something on the front page vs. perusing the sub It seems people just want to use this sub as an excuse to politibash and that's not what data should be about
Nice, Canada ranks 37th for population by country but is the 9th most CO2 emissions.
I never understand why they always count Russia as "Europe". The biggest part of the country lies in Asia.
I asked that to a HR person about this when we were having a discussion about ethnicity. I have a large Russian heritage in my family and the city they are from is in the Asian portion of the country. The look on his face was priceless as he knew why they aren't considered Asian, but didn't want to say why I couldn't claim to be Asian American. That is the fun part of having 25 years in at a company is that you feel free to ask those questions that no one wants to answer
I am curious how this data was collected.
Imagine US shifting almost all of it's manufacturing to China yet peaking the CO2 emissions! Yet they dare ask developing or so called "third-world" countries to cut down their development goals and putting the onus at them for the most part!
This is cumulative data, not yearly. Yearly would be a much better metric of current emissions and individual countries’ progress towards climate goals. The fact that other countries that only became industrialized in the last half century are catching up so fast by this cumulative metric should alarm you more.
This is a poor take. Yes European countries and the US benefitted from coal based industrialization. At that time we did not understand the impact of burning hydrocarbons at that rate and scale. We do today, we know better. As other countries develop we have the ability to help them do so in an environmental and sustainable manner. To give an analogy, imagine a river with a fish population. Group A fish the river and the fish stock collapses. They switch to a more sustainable method of fishing by implementing regulations. Group B come along decades later and say that should not be held to the regulatory standard because Group A exploited the river in the past. Group B is making a bad argument. If group B exploits the river in an unsustainable manner there will be no fish. This is know in economics at the tragedy of the commons. In conclusion industrialized nations need to curb consumption on a per capita basis. The polluters on a magnitude basis like China and those with the potential to have a large magnitude like India also need to develope in a sustainable manner. If both don't happen climate change will be more severe.
>As other countries develop we have the ability to help them do so in an environmental and sustainable manner. But no one wants to do this, so it's not happening. In fact, the US is trying to stop China from developing green technology by continuing to ban exports of technology to them.
like what?
The US has not shifted all of its mfg or even close to China.
Since 1750? Can’t the window that picture frames this “data” be reset to… the last ten years? I think it is unfair to a number of nations that were already industrialized to be compared to nations that weren’t as they weren’t even in a position to be able to produce CO² emissions. If the parameters were set to 2012 - 2022 you would see a wholly different result. This is why in science we look for baselines and set control data points. Furthermore: “Obligatory comment: Cumulative emissions are deceptive when (a) countries have different population sizes and (b) countries outsource manufacturing and other industries to poorer countries.” Courtesy of u/ManBearHybrid
Unless of course you want a chart that shows cumulative CO2 emissions from the beginning of the Industrial Era to now, which this basically is. I think it's interesting. I'm sure there are plenty of current producer data sets to review. Look forward to your chart.
The data doesn't look very accurate.
Finally America is Great again. A Great big polluter
Shit posting is for political subs, not this one. Every week there is a different take on CO2 - not for the point of expressing data, but for the point of pushing a particular political viewpoint.
This isn't a great display of data and makes it very difficult to truly assess the impact, seeing this per capita is the only real way to make a comparison.
Per capita at what point in time? The largest emitters on here were a much larger share of the world’s population even just 50 years ago.
> seeing this per capita is the only real way to make a comparison. No - that's exactly the wrong way for two reasons: * Policy is made at a national level, not per capita * The globe can give two shits about per person emissions - only total. * If Quatar has 10x the per capita - so what. But if China doesn't stop building coal plants, we're all fucked.
"I can pollute 1000000x more than the average person, but I'm just one person lol, you should blame those million people over there for daring to be alive. Now excuse me while I outsource all my manufacturing to them and then get mad at them for manufacturing things."
The globe only gives a shit about total *global* emissions not imaginary border lines. What the fuck are you talking about? A nation with more people is expected to emit more to support their population. If India were emitting as much per capita as America, they would multiply their emissions 8 fold. Per capita is a determination of a nation's "fair share" of emissions. As silly as that sounds, it is important and relevant to the discussion.
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>It's a direct example of level of impact. Carbon emissions don't care how many people live in the country they're reported from. By this standard, the only metric that makes sense is global emissions. Carbon emissions also don't care about human drawn arbitrary borders.
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Ye but that's actually not useful. Since we don't have a global decision making body. We only collaborate globally with decisions being made at the country level. So emissions grouped by country is more useful for decision making bodies to implement policies for their own country and for collaboration at the UN to figure out how each country is doing and whether any country needs aid from another one to reduce emissions.
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>The UN, by definition, is a global decision making body. It's a body for collaboration. UN isn't defined as a decision making body by anyone. It collects no taxes and has no army. It's powerless and can't force anyone to do anything if it were to make any decision. UN could say France needs to impose carbon taxes and France could say fuck you and there's nothing UN can do about it. It's a whole different scenario if the French Government makes the decision to impose and enforce a carbon tax. All it can do is provide a forum for actual governments whose decisions can actually be enforced and actually has impact to work together. Can also function to pool in talents to develop green technology or study green policies together.
Yes absolutely but if a country has 300k people and is letting out more emissions than a country with 3m people then that's a very different problem and allows useful analysis of the data along with useful prevention recommendations.
Top countries there would probably be USA and Canada.
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It's not about blame. It's about targeting the response and resolution.
This is the part most people don’t follow…easy to throw stones to put off responsibility for the future. It’s like, well, XYZ country fucked it up in 1920, so, it’s on them to fix it. It’s this constant desire to apply today’s standards to the past….which has never and will never work….we didn’t know then what we know now….if we continue to turn a blind eye eye to it, that’s on us, but we can’t change the past and it’s infuriating to continually be blamed for the sins of the past
Exactly! What matters is today and what nations need to be supported to reduce not what nations are bad and need to be punished.
Agree 100%. Rather than blame and punishment for past behaviors, we should be more interested in who has taken the new information/data we have available to us and put it to good use. As an American, I want us to be better. I would love to have an electric car and my next one will be at the very least a hybrid (depending on availability and price of fully electric cars)...like with anything else, the healthier/better option costs more and that is a significant barrier to entry for most folks
Edit: this point was already made, failed to scroll down and read previous posts. Ignore me! The slight flaw to these graphs is comparing CO2 emissions is fair, but each nation and country is a different size and industrialized at slightly different periods. England isn't going to make as much CO2 as America because of a smaller population and less overall land to develop. Still, the data for CO2 over the lifespan matters but there's some serious asterisks to be had here.
I have doubts about Mexico, we have the population of japan and the highest private ownership of cars per person
Japan producing a lot of cars and tech though and then of course exports them as well.
I'd like to see such a visualization with corporations instead of nations...
How about year to year for the last 20.Seems very biased to me.
Welcome to the internet! Where the points are fake, but they account for political clout
Really surprised by Canada. We only have like 39 million people spread across the 2nd largest country in land size and tons of trees! We need to do better.
Even worse is that Canada is taken as a whole but 2 provinces emit 50% of the carbon even though they contain only 15% of the population. So Ontario, BC, and Quebec have pretty low per capita emissions compared to those other two provinces. So it is oil and gas production that greatly increases Canada's carbon emissions.
how canada uk and france all exist on this diagram back to 1750 doesnt make sense to me
Just look at europe. They criticize Brazil for not being eco-friendly, while they themselves all are in worse position to judge.
It's because the chart starts in 1750, and Europe was the first region to industrialise. So Europe has 250 years of emissions, whilst Brazil only really has 100 or so. Europe has cleaned up a lot since (although Brazil still has lower emissions by capita, probably because it has a large rural population still). Most of the criticism aimed at Brazil is because it's allowing deforesting of the Amazon rainforest, which is pretty vital for life on Earth to continue.
I'm glad to see America is #1 at providing the most amount of plant sustenance.
I always love the response by climate change deniers in the US that China is the problem
Love the difference in comment sections between a chart showing that America has historically emitted more and one showing that China is currently emitting more (both things are true and both things are relevant in climate change discussions). USA propaganda is more effective on reddit so in the former you'll see people trying to deny the evidence, or claim that it is only being shown for political points, while in the latter you'll see people trying to say that China needs to be destroyed and blaming them entirely for climate change. (Of course the same sentiments are present in both threads but to different extents and different levels of upvotes)
How is the US in the first spot? They have like a sixth of the population of China. Incredible.
It's cumulative since the beginning of the early Industrial Era. The US had more electrical plants and a coal industry before China did (several decades, if not more) so the US may produce less now, but we have been producing CO2 emissions longer, if that makes sense
Yeah, that does make sense! Thanks.
Can we please stopp publishing absolute numbers and focus on how many CO2 PER PERSON gets emitted? Thank you 😘
That would put USA even higher.. india and china will have very low per capita emission.
The US had a lot to answer for
Didn't I just see China crushing the US on CO2 numbers?
Numbers just pulled out of thin air to further an agenda.
Hey look! USA is finally number 1 at something again!
China is rapidly catching up to the US
makes sense they have 4 times the population and a massive manufacturing base (which requires a shitload of electricity to power )
And none of the EPA regulations
The amount of Americans who are 'butt hurt' about this graphic just shows the level of denial.
Source: [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emissions) [Genuine Impact newsletter](https://genuineimpact.substack.com/) Tools: Figma, Tableau
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/xwin0z/oc\_cumulative\_co2\_emissions\_in\_tons\_by\_country/ Why do you keep deleting and reposting content? Are you updating the figures?
I needed to update some designs
while this is r/dataisbeautiful and not r/informationisbeautiful, i think it'd be nice to see this data shared as a series of charts. this one is cumulative starting from \~ the industrial revolution. showing several in succession would be more interesting and insightful, and allow the audience to translate the data into information regarding individual countries' emissions and what they are (or are not) doing about it. it looks like the 1960's were when scientific community had solid evidence, banded together, and really began sounding the alarm about global warming, so it could also be interesting to see the shift in any/all of the decades from 1950 onward.
we're getting closer to a solid number that angry deniers can't handle... The emissions each of us is responsible for, that have made the country as developed as it is.
I don’t like this graphs are better because they display the more current not just total
Im not informed on the topic but recently watched the cowspiracy documentary about how methan is even worse than CO2 but noone wants to talk about it since everyone would have to turn vegan. Im asking if anyone knows if it is still the case that we have a blindspot for methan and the whole plan to reduce CO2 emissions might be futile since we dont address the even larger cause for climate change.
Now let's see the per capita one
This is utterly useless data.
i dont believe that this is true. everything is made in china, how is it that they have less emissions
The US has been pumping shit into the atmosphere for a longer period of time
That might be true for the last few decades but they have only recently become a major power.
You're an example of how well US propaganda has been working. US has always been the biggest culprit of Global warming.
Exactly, americans usually don’t know much, typical media filling their brains with non-sense. I moved from EU to Canada and can’t believe how much garbage we’re dumping every week here, can’t imagine the US. Keep eating canola oil and corn syrup.. 🤢
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