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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

US per capita CO2 emissions are now down to World War 1 levels.

Which, to put in perspective, is 25% higher than the UK (industrial revolution starter and all that) has ever been. The EU-27 average is lower still, but not every country had its peak at the same time so that makes sense.

Today's "leaders" are oil states like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, followed on the heels by Australia, the USA, and... Mongolia? Because of the low population density, they got a lot of individual house's heating or why?

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.

Early industrialisation was incredibly inefficient.

For example stuff like this https://www.visit-nottinghamshire.co.uk/things-to-do/papplew.... Coal (Steam engine) powered pumping station for public water supply - very beautiful design, not so good for the environment.

That's remarkable considering there wasn't even air conditioning or washing machines or commercial airline travel back then.

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.

No. What US did is decarbonization and energy efficiency improvement. Trade-adjusted emission, taking into account of manufacturing outsourcing, is also decreasing, since 2005.

Ok but now take into account the CO2 emissions due to goods that are used/consumed by Americans, but produced and shipped from elsewhere (ex China).

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.

And what’s population vs. then?

"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).

Just from eyeballing the dates on the chart, I’m guessing a lot of those extra emissions are due to the oil industry and the long history of production within the United States. The US was the number one producer for a while, never really fell that far behind Russia or Saudi Arabia, and became (and I believe is still) the top producer again.

Does that make oil very cheap and therefore easily burned, or do you mean the emissions are a side-effect of drilling in the first place?

A combination of both those factors, but primarily the latter.

I wasn’t making a point, I was asking a question…

The big picture is that world population is leveling off at 9-10 billion and emissions per capita will eventually level off and then go down, so total emissions is not on some kind of runaway exponential curve.

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