In an excellent post, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times dot Earth blog poses the question – “Where would carbon dioxide emissions be if everyone on Earth was using fossil fuels at the same pace, per capita, as the United States is now?”
Using some simple math, Revkin presents some not so surprising facts:
It’s simple multiplication. Right now, the sum of global emissions of carbon dioxide by 6.6 billion very-unequal humans is about 29 billion tons a year. (An excellent database is here on historic and current emissions, from energy and cement making.)
If everyone was emitting at the British level, it’d be 66 billion tons a year. Okay, let’s try the United States. That would be 132 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year, if everyone on Earth had an equal carbon footing.
We spent a couple of minutes with Excel and a global emissions database to put some of these figures into a global perspective:
Revkin sums up this situation perfectly:
So clearly something has to give, presuming the countries of the world are serious about accepting the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which they all did, ostensibly, last year).
In doing so, Revkin asks the question that after much discussion remains unanswered: what’s going to give?
Further reading:
Andrew Revkin – dot Earth, Millennium Development Goals Indicators, Trends Compendium of Data on Global Climate Change, and a shameless plug for TalkClimateChange
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