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RE: [pf] CO2 by average Americans and rich Americans. A statistic.
by David A
28 November 2000 04:41 UTC

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David MacClement wrote:
> · I'll start by saying that /I/ don't see what's so impossible 
> about people, even Americans, reducing their individual and 
> family carbon dioxide production by 2/3 (to get down to that 1/3), 
> eventually. 

I think one of the obstacles is that people sense there'd be an impact 
on standard of living, and (absent new technologies, of course) I'm not 
sure that's not incorrect. I've been playing around with some 
statistics, below. The first column is CO2 emissions per capita (metric 
tons), and the second is CO2 emissions per GDP (grams/$):

United States     5.51     184
India             0.24     158
New Zealand       2.49     141
Jamaica           1.07     294
Germany           2.86     156
Australia         4.78     225
Swaziland         0.18      44
WORLD TOTAL       1.07     249
WORLD (minus US)  0.85     281

That the CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP is about the same for many 
countries, 150-225 g/$, shows that reducing one's CO2 emissions is a 
strong function of reducing one's GDP.

Does this mean that Americans, say, can't reduce their CO2 emissions? Of 
course not--for example, almost all American's increases in CO2 
emissions due to transportation (1990-1997) are due to "light trucks," 
viz. unregulated SUVs. And the other conservations efforts that David 
Mac suggests. But at some point (again, barring new technologies) 
reducing a country's CO2 emissions is going to mean that they have to 
reduce their "standard of living," as currently defined in that country. 
There are certainly benefits to doing that, and that's difficult to get 
people to consider. I suspect that the typical US citizen's reluctance 
to take global warming seriously reflects that difficulty in a 
significant way.

David

Statistics are from:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424032348/http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/carbon/appb.asp               
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424032348/http://www.abcnews.go.com/reference/countries
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424032348/http://www.popin.org/pop1998/
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424032348/http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres98_e/pr98_e.htm