Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time

It is harder, although people have tried to do it, e.g.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...

It's got to be very close to per capita spending.

Definitely harder to measure, but I think this is the basic premise of John Michael Greer's Wealth of Nature [1]: that what we refer to as the "primary" economy—resource extraction industries like mining, farming, and so on—are in fact secondary to the true primary economy of purely natural systems upon which those industries rest, and if we can devise means of valuing and pricing the contribution of that true primary economy, then we'll be much better positioned not to treat those resources (including things like the ability of it to absorb pollution) as bottomless.

On the one hand, it's carbon pricing ++, but I think it's quite a holistic way of looking at the matter, since it's also trying to consider the multitude of other ways that poor stewardship of the natural world ultimately impacts the survivability of the planet, in terms of things like over-fishing, deforestation leading to soil erosion, irresponsible pesticide use leading to monocultures, etc etc.

[1]: https://newsociety.ca/books/w/the-wealth-of-nature

It’s called “embodied energy” and is notoriously difficult to calculate due to globalisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

Corporations promoted offshoring/outsourcing specifically to move their most pollutant/dangerous processes to the developing world — out of reach from the threat of western democracy and it’s environmental/labor regulations.

Using per capita production is a whataboutism psychological warfare tactic to derail climate/emissions discussions and point the finger at China etc, even though the developed world has always been responsible for the majority of the demand, and “embodied” energy/emissions.

Not really. The Global Carbon Project maintains a database of estimates of consumption-based emissions:

* https://www.icos-cp.eu/science-and-impact/global-carbon-budg...

We already do. Both are useful.

Or.. country could just ignore the data. I think the only solution is for the rich country to pay the poor countries to decrease their usage proportional to the expected decrease. Not arguing if it is fair or not, but likely the only thing that could work.

I want to make this perfectly clear: The Canadian people are not responsible for the per-capita emissions of the country; we have no control over it and there's nothing citizens can do to reduce our footprint.

Canada's high emissions per-capita are a combination of its disproportionately large industry, 2nd largest landmass in the world, a large part of the country being a frozen wasteland, and its miniscule population.

Per-capita is useless in practice because a factory pumping out 1000000 units in Canada will look bad per-capita.

A factory pumping 1000000 units in China looks great per-capita.

It's not a fair comparison at all and if Canada was 0.0 emissions per-capita it would make 0 difference in the world because China outputs the equivalent to a Canada in a short time frame.

Canada's energy is the cleanest in the entire world by a massive margin. Ontario is 100% non-emitting energy. Canada never gets any credit for any of this, ever, while European countries still buying natural gas from Russia are lauded as trailblazers in clean energy.

Canada does far far more than its fair share for the rest of the world and it doesn't deserve to be singled out due to an idiotic statistic that is only useful for comparing local phenomenons.

"per capita"

Being as good as WW1 is a positive because the USA's emission peak was quite a lot higher still in the 1970s (per capita), I don't think this was criticism necessarily.

What surprised me, what I didn't know, is that the USA has been one of the highest for so long actually, starting to be worse than what most of the EU is today (~10t CO2e/capita/year) already in ~1903 and remaining that way even during the great depression. Being back to 1915 levels is not that bad with that kind of history (of course, until the ~1990s at the earliest, nobody knew this was an issue so no blame/fault for that era).

Mongolia is a very mining-centric economy (kind of like Australia), especially in coal. The vast majority of Mongolia's electricity comes from coal.

> Which, to put in perspective, is 25% higher than the UK (industrial revolution starter and all that)

What do you mean to suggest by "industrial revolution starter and all that"? I would not expect emissions at the very beginning of the industrial revolution to hold a candle to peak industrialization. Being the first to industrialize seems entirely irrelevant.

Air conditioners are actually remarkably efficient at what they do, doubly so if used for heating as well. Washing machines are also a lot more efficient than the alternative, that being people manually washing clothes. And commercial airlines don't emit THAT much per capita since most people don't fly all that often.

What the US had during WWI was a lot of domestic manufacturing which is now outsourced and the replacement CO2 emitters are probably mostly cars and animal farming.

Do they want to eat their cake and have it too?

They could add an export tax or whatever (maybe pollution tax) and use that to offset emissions (diff sources of energy or scrubbers, etc)

People did that too, and it is still decreasing after trade adjustment.

Individual consumption is in fact one of primary sources of emissions. That's not BP or Exxon propaganda, see what EPA says about it:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Transportation is 28%, and industry is 23%. US in fact drives larger cars like SUV and cars with worse fuel efficiency. This is directly reflected in higher per capita emission of US compared to Europe.