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Comment by l332mn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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