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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

This is just why people like me with experience in living in east Asia (Taiwan from 1982 through 1985, followed later by 1998 through 2001) were appalled that China and India were granted an out from the Kyoto Protocol international convention rules on greenhouse gas emissions. I understood as well as anyone from my experience in Taiwan that China would need time to produce as little pollution per unit of primary energy as the United States does, but not setting up any system of incentives to bring that about seemed like madness to me at the time, and still does. The United States did more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the last year (by substituting natural gas for coal in electric power generation) than China ever has since the Kyoto Protocol was signed by many countries.

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>The United States did more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the last year (by substituting natural gas for coal in electric power generation) than China ever has since the Kyoto Protocol was signed by many countries.

I was going to say that the US was the largest contributor to CO2 emissions, so it would be fitting if they were also the quickest to take measures to reduce them. But this page shows otherwise:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html#fo...

It was hard to find up to the minute data, but the Guardian has a slick infographic and list of quick facts using 2009 data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-ca...

I'm surprised that India emits so much less than China, since the Kyoto discussions made it sound like China's per capita pollution was absolutely necessary for development.

Also shocked that Gibraltar produces 158 tons per capita (for comparison, the US is the highest per capita emitter among large economies with 18 tpc). Gibraltar is mediterranean, I wouldn't expect they'd need much heating and cooling. Maybe they're making a lot of extra power for export?

China uses a lot more energy for heating. Things may change once AC becomes more common in India, but that's still a long way off. Also, IT is a larger portion of India's GDP, which takes far less energy than manufacturing.

Face it, China and India are abusing this process. Per Capita is meaningless when a significant portion of your population has no means to contribute to the numbers other than to reduce the perceived impact.

I would love to see China's numbers when the population numbers are reduced to those who are living within the major population centers and not counting those in outlying areas who may not even have electricity.

So count people who have homes which are on the grid or its equivalent.

That's surprising. I didn't realize China was #1 in aggregate CO2 emissions. Of course... per capita, the US is still like 3x China from the look of it.

Per $ of GDP and per capita GDP, China is far worse. That's a far more important forward looking measure.

> per capita, the US is still like 3x China from the look of it.

For now. Check the relative growth of both countries.

China growing at 13.9% pa puts it as doubling CO2 output every 5 years.

The US's 7% decline is likely an artifact of the coal -> natural gas transition, but if sustained would see the country halving use in a decade.

Smog != C02 People keep treating the two as if they're the same. They point at Beijing and think global warming.

Having more efficient power-plants, catalytic converters on cars, filtration, less use of coal, and more advanced engines in general leads to more complete combustion and less smog (less CO too).

I'm sure Beijing has lots of cars and people, but so does for instance NYC , and they don't have the same smog problems.

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