U.S. per capita carbon emissions are lower now than in 1918 | Hacker News Reader

U.S. per capita carbon emissions are lower now than in 1918

ourworldindata.org

45 pointsnabla946 comments

To put it bluntly, what the title says is just not true. This graph measures the "burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production". Cement production and burning of fossil fules only. Hence it is misleading at best. It doesn't at all include household emissions or food production, which represent the largest share emissions, probably indirectly around 80%-90% of all emissions, if we measure the whole life cycle of products consumed.

I.e. what we're seeing here is a tiny fraction of the total carbon footprint. Considering that consumption today in terms of resources per capita has vastly increased, the title is simply a blatantly false statement.

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/3269/2020/

That is just based on the sub-title from OurWorldInData. If you dive into the source document linked above, you will find that the figure is indeed computed how one would first guess it is: add up all national emissions and divide by population.

"The estimates of global and national fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) include the combustion of fossil fuels through a wide range of activities (e.g. transport, heating and cooling, industry, fossil industry own use, and natural gas flaring), the production of cement, and other process emissions (e.g. the production of chemicals and fertilizers) as well as CO2 uptake during the cement carbonation process."

>include household emissions

How is that not burning of fossil fuels for energy?

Emissions from household consumption is so much more than simply burning fossil fuel for energy, which amounts to only about 20% in total.

That is incorrect.

In 2019, CO2 emissions accounted for about 80% of total U.S. anthropogenic GHG emissions (based on 100-year global warming potential). Fossil fuel combustion (burning) for energy accounted for 74% of total U.S. GHG emissions and for 92% of total U.S. anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environme...

First of all, that statistic is not about household emissions, but emissions in total (production only perhaps). On the other hand, it doesn't include all types of household emissions either, because it doesn't account for the entire life cycle of emissions tied to products that has been produced in other countries, and which US citizens consume to a much higher degree than the global average. Household consumption is the main driver of emissions, and high-consuming societies bears much of the blame for the emissions generated by production which has been outsourced to other countries.

Absolutely this. Carbon footprint is the measurement to use here, and that must take into account a holistic analysis of the outputs of production and logistics.

Alternative title: US per capita emissions at lowest levels since 1964.

I'm not sure which is more accurate but I believe the one I proposed is.

It is still a good sign that we're decreasing but I do not think the title accurately indicates the state of things and I think people assumed it as a smooth curve up then down between 1918 and now and not a low and chaotic period between 1918 and 1960. My fear is that people often respond to the title and not the content. While I'd rather have the latter I think we should make title as accurate as possible and understand what assumptions people will make.

It's not about accuracy. They demonstrate different things.

Producing the GDP/capita of today with the same CO2/capita as 1918 is incredible. That's why the date was chosen.

> Producing the GDP/capita of today with the same CO2/capita as 1918 is incredible.

Is it as incredible as producing the same GDP/capita as 1960? Why or why not?

Move the slider to 1921, see how suddenly the current value is 24% above that one. It's basically a meaningless, cherrypicked point in time that was submitted. This feels misleading at best and disingenious at worst.

1921 encompasses the tail end of a depression, which means economic activity was greatly reduced, and you would expect emissions to be greatly reduced as a result. 1918 doesn't have this issue nearly as bad.

Why not pick a date during the tail end of Great Depression instead? Would that have been too obvious?

1918 marks the last year of a world war and the start of a global pandemic. It might not be the tail end of a depression, but there's other issues with using it as a baseline...

The all-time high is not cherry-picked and emissions have gone down since then while the economy has grown. Decoupling is possible and we just need to keep going.

Right. Emissions now lower than when everyone was individually burning wood and coal 24 hours a day. Ok? Is that surprising or useful or actionable?

They're not, though. Household emissions are many, many times larger now. Also wood is not a fossil fuel.

> They're not, though.

Are you saying the data is simply wrong?

> Household emissions are many, many times larger now.

The article is about per capita emissions, not household emissions.

> Also wood is not a fossil fuel.

Nobody said it was. What's this got to do with anything?

> Are you saying the data is simply wrong?

The data only measures cement production and fossil fuel burning, as the caption says. It says nothing about total emissions per capita. Hence the title is wrong, yes.

> The article is about per capita emissions, not household emissions.

Household emissions contribute the largest share of per capita emissions. But hardly any household emissions are measured by "cement production and fossil fuel burning".

> Nobody said it was. What's this got to do with anything?

Burning wood is carbon neutral.

It's interesting to look at the long term trends, especially when looking at some of the largest economies on the planet.

Comparing the US[0] and China[1], the US has:

- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)

- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)

Meanwhile for the same period China has had

- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)

- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007

So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Or... perhaps just by having everything manufactured in China? Which doesn't work so well when you're China?

Or anywhere else in the world, eventually. (Soon?)

These graphs measures "burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production" only, which only represents a fraction of the total emissions in a country. It doesn't measure household emissions or food production. It also heavily favours post-industrial countries compared to countries still in the process of building heavy infrastructure (which requires cement production), like China. These data are biased and self-serving in that sense. US citizens still consume five times more than Chinese citizens in terms of resources, which is unsustainable.

US and China have relatively similar land masses, thus arguably similar levels of available resources. China happens to have a population 4.2 larger than US, thus 4.2 lower per capita resources. If US resource consumption is unsustainable, then so is China's.

Not sure what your argument is. We're talking about per capita emissions, not per country emissions, which doesn't even make sense. Why would an arbitrary grouping of human beings like a nation matter in terms of what emissions each individual should be allowed to represent?

We are comparing energy / sqmi. US and China have similar landmass. 3.8M sqmi vs 3.7M sqmi. Comparing their total energy consumption is, up to a constant factor, the same as comparing their energy / sqmi consumption.

Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded, thus per capita energy poor or sparsely populated, thus per capita energy rich.

> Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded

Uh.. How exactly are countries supposed to decide if they'd "like" to be crowded?

By the way, do you think the matter of simply possessing a large, mostly empty area like Alaska should grant the US an additional "quota" of emissions since it technically reduces US population density?

Speaking of US and China, obvious candidates are immigration policy and one-child policy. Other levers: female education, child mortality reduction, shift in cultural norms towards small nuclear families, access to contraceptives. The entire 'western' world is experiencing population decline, and not for lack of resources.

As a curiosity, I saw a few years ago an article from Africa: 'Meet the Ugandan Businessman with 13 Wives, 176 Children'. I hope we can agree that this kind of reproductive behavior is utterly unsustainable in a world that has learned about its limits (and sadly overshot them already).

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/mustafa-mugambo-mutone

Edit: Of course landmass is an approximation. Of course Alaska / Arizona are not Iowa. On the flip side, Tibet / Xianjiang are not Guangdong either. The core point that given that TotalEmissions = Population * PerCapitaEmissions and the Earth only cares about TotalEmissions. We've got to price for the Population term somehow, lest it becomes an unaccounted externality.

The paradox of the situation is that population levels is mostly correlated with consumption levels. Which means that lowering population by natural means implies much higher emissions in total. Population levels are tied to economic conditions, and it's a false hope to try to control it through policy alone, which can affect it somewhat in the short term but not at all in the long term.

Population control is a misguided concept, and has a grim history, ranging from mass sterilisation in India to the "lebensraum" idea of the Nazis. It's not a sensible path, and is mostly tied to extreme ideologies and Malthusian pseudo-science.

Pointing to Uganda, whose citizens represents probably about 1% of emissions per capita compared to the west is is crazy to me. How can one even excuse ones own high consumption levels while blaming Ugandans for reproducing, when one represents the same amount emissions as that of a small village in some places?

Malthus thesis was that populations grow exponentially, whereas resources grow linearly, thus population will relatively soon overshoot the available resources. Malthus was also an optimist. We are in a situation where we have a hard limit on the amount of (fossil fuel energy) resources we can globally expend. At least according to the Paris agreement. Take your time to internalize the consequences of this hard limit. Hint: TotalEmissions(fixed) = Population * PerCapitaEmissions.

PS. I pointed to one Mustafa Mugambo Mutone. The future that his descendants will inhabit will hopefully see a convergence of lifestyles across cultures and continents.

US exports dirty production to other countries so some of the drop is not real (just gets allocated to other countries). Also despite this we still produce more than 2x more per capita than China.

(We have 225 million more people now than in 1918)

Exactly. Per Capita seems somewhat irrelevant here.

It's certainly good that it's down, but if you overlay the charts of the US and China, you can see that post-2000, the US reduction in CO2 is mirrored by a Chinese increase.

It's unclear how much of the US reduction is due to genuine improvements in energy efficiencies and how much is due to simply moving a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry offshore.

I remember politicians where I live congratulating themselves on meeting some set of CO2 targets a few years ago. The reality is, we lost most of our manufacturing sector, so energy and fuel use went down naturally. This chart has no meaning without some kind of supply chain adjustment to account for where people get the stuff they consume.

Not true. People have done the math and our emissions do not change that much if you do it by end product consumption vs production.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Interesting thanks. I'm curious what the intuition is for why. My apparently wrong intuition is that if we're importing all our goods, we're incurring the emissions associated with their production + transportation in other places.

A lot of emissions are from transport, electricity production, cement production, and heating; none of those are offshore

And in terms of manufacturing, while a lot of the labor intensive (but more emissions light) manufacturing jobs have gone overseas due to lower wages, most heavy industry (chemicals, etc) has remained onshore because those products are bulky

Also 63% higher than 1932. Cherry picked statistical comparison.

So it was 15T/person in 1920, then it crossed the 20T mark in 70s and now has fallen back to 15T. The catch is that the US population has increased quite a lot. Are there similar charts for CO2 absorbtion by oceans and trees?

I'm not sure why this measurement would matter very much. Insofar as I understand it, the amount of atmosphere doesn't adjust based on human population size, so a per capita indicator isn't all that useful for most of the reasons one even bothers to keep track of carbon emissions in the first place.

Probably says more about how many people there are than the carbon production.

> Note: CO₂ emissions are measured on a production basis, meaning they do not correct for emissions embedded in traded goods.

So, we're leaving all the carbon involved in the production inspired by our consumptive habits on China. This is utter nonsense.

Really the only statistic that matters is the global one. Otherwise, all this might show is the US outsourcing its manufacturing to China.

Doesn't take into account transportation and heating with fossil fuels.

This gets posted fairly regularly, but I'm not sure what the take-away is supposed to be. I think if you post something like this, you should at least prompt the discussion to start in some way, so that it isn't just a blank graph.

Yes, coal is dying as far as electricity generation goes. Has been for a decade.

The metrics don't really change much if you account for CO2 emissions needed for production/transportation:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita?...

The graph caption says "Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production. Land use change is not included."

Is the caption incorrect?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com