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> China has around 1/5'th of the emissions per capita compared to western countries. It's western countries that are a threat to the environment. China has rou

by jeeeb 5y ago

> China has around 1/5'th of the emissions per capita compared to western countries. It's western countries that are a threat to the environment. China has roughly twice the per capita CO2 emissions of the UK, France or Italy (about 10 tonnes per capita to 5). It’s 2019 level of 10.1 tonnes per capita is significantly than higher the European average of 6.6 tonnes, but less than the US average of 17.6 tonnes. Source on Chinese CO2 emissions: https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-countries/ https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-...

l332mn 5y ago
These statistics don't take into account consumption based emissions, only production based emissions (except oil production, I believe). Western countries have outsourced their production to developing countries (which looks nice for them on emission graphs), but their consumption based emissions are steadily rising. If you take into account trade of goods as well as production of goods, it's not as nice of a picture as those graphs would have you believe.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jeeeb 5y ago
  So I researched this a bit. Accounts vary on this. The RCG source I linked above puts China's territorial CO2 emissions at around 14 gigatons and China's consumption based emissions (accounting for place of consumption) at around 13 gigatons. So that's not actually a particularly significant adjustment. The Global Carbon Project also attempts to quantify this. They put China as a net exporter of CO2 to the order of 0.7 tons of CO2 per capita in 2018. Compared to this Western European countries imported around 1-2 tons of CO2 per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). According to Global Carbon Project estimates China's 2018 CO2 consumption was similar to that of France or Spain. Of course since 2018 China's economy and CO2 emissions have continued to grow. So to summarize even adjusting for place of consumption China's CO2 emissions are at best broadly similar to those of Western Europe and certainly not 5x lower as originally implied. That said the US is definitely a worse emitter per-capita. That aside I think the problem of consumption based emissions accounting is that it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. For example if China chooses to burn dirty coal so that it can provide cheap energy to increase the competitiveness of its exporters that's okay, it's the fault of the countries taking those exports not China.
  - dirtyid 5y ago
    Wonder how much of this is Chinese emissions being construction driven, especially on "new" stuff developed west gets to hide into historical emissiond data. This is the same in most developing countries who need to build on massive scale for the first time if they want to be uplifted from outdated building stock. More so in Asia lacking in renewable construction materials like wood. So we get stats like China using more concrete in a few years than US in last century. PRC is still at 60% urbanization rate. Even accounting for ghost city memes and 60M+ empty apartments, that's still ~300M dwelling units and infrastructure short for 80% urbanization goal in next 50 years. Unless there's significant building material improvements, China and many other countries still has a lot of emissions to "catch up". And for the purpose of development and alleviating poverty, the faster the better. >it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. That's another consideration that seperates PRC, who is actually competent at expediently building massively, both politically and industrially. A capability many countries lack. Majority of countries are unable adopt emission heavy policies even if they wanted to. Would be interesting to see projected US emissions if they could actually pursue uncompromised infrastructure plan. Something like total emission of plan since it'll likely be stretched over much longer period due to how slow US builds. Or what was Europe / Japan / Korea's per capita emission rebuilding the country post war which is akin the the breadth and speed of developement in China.
  - l332mn 5y ago
    Those statistics are very incomplete, as they don't measure the emissions connected to the whole lifecycle of products, but rather seem to track only a weighted average of production based emissions (which appears to be their definition of consumption based emissions). In order to get a realistic measure, we need to keep track of the whole product lifecycle, from gathering materials and production, to lifetime usage, waste disposal and reabsorption into the earth and atmosphere. This multiplies the total sum of emissions many times over, and heavily disfavours high-consuming per capita countries. If we compare household consumption rates, China is emitting only a fraction of that of western households. In terms of money spent, consumption per capita of the US is about 6-7 times larger than that of China.
    - 5y ago

by jeeeb 5y ago

l332mn 5y ago

These statistics don't take into account consumption based emissions, only production based emissions (except oil production, I believe). Western countries have outsourced their production to developing countries (which looks nice for them on emission graphs), but their consumption based emissions are steadily rising. If you take into account trade of goods as well as production of goods, it's not as nice of a picture as those graphs would have you believe.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeeeb 5y ago
So I researched this a bit. Accounts vary on this. The RCG source I linked above puts China's territorial CO2 emissions at around 14 gigatons and China's consumption based emissions (accounting for place of consumption) at around 13 gigatons. So that's not actually a particularly significant adjustment. The Global Carbon Project also attempts to quantify this. They put China as a net exporter of CO2 to the order of 0.7 tons of CO2 per capita in 2018. Compared to this Western European countries imported around 1-2 tons of CO2 per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). According to Global Carbon Project estimates China's 2018 CO2 consumption was similar to that of France or Spain. Of course since 2018 China's economy and CO2 emissions have continued to grow. So to summarize even adjusting for place of consumption China's CO2 emissions are at best broadly similar to those of Western Europe and certainly not 5x lower as originally implied. That said the US is definitely a worse emitter per-capita. That aside I think the problem of consumption based emissions accounting is that it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. For example if China chooses to burn dirty coal so that it can provide cheap energy to increase the competitiveness of its exporters that's okay, it's the fault of the countries taking those exports not China.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  Wonder how much of this is Chinese emissions being construction driven, especially on "new" stuff developed west gets to hide into historical emissiond data. This is the same in most developing countries who need to build on massive scale for the first time if they want to be uplifted from outdated building stock. More so in Asia lacking in renewable construction materials like wood. So we get stats like China using more concrete in a few years than US in last century. PRC is still at 60% urbanization rate. Even accounting for ghost city memes and 60M+ empty apartments, that's still ~300M dwelling units and infrastructure short for 80% urbanization goal in next 50 years. Unless there's significant building material improvements, China and many other countries still has a lot of emissions to "catch up". And for the purpose of development and alleviating poverty, the faster the better. >it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. That's another consideration that seperates PRC, who is actually competent at expediently building massively, both politically and industrially. A capability many countries lack. Majority of countries are unable adopt emission heavy policies even if they wanted to. Would be interesting to see projected US emissions if they could actually pursue uncompromised infrastructure plan. Something like total emission of plan since it'll likely be stretched over much longer period due to how slow US builds. Or what was Europe / Japan / Korea's per capita emission rebuilding the country post war which is akin the the breadth and speed of developement in China.
- l332mn 5y ago
  Those statistics are very incomplete, as they don't measure the emissions connected to the whole lifecycle of products, but rather seem to track only a weighted average of production based emissions (which appears to be their definition of consumption based emissions). In order to get a realistic measure, we need to keep track of the whole product lifecycle, from gathering materials and production, to lifetime usage, waste disposal and reabsorption into the earth and atmosphere. This multiplies the total sum of emissions many times over, and heavily disfavours high-consuming per capita countries. If we compare household consumption rates, China is emitting only a fraction of that of western households. In terms of money spent, consumption per capita of the US is about 6-7 times larger than that of China.
  - 5y ago