5 ms·

And what’s population vs. then?

• lucb1e 3y ago
  "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).
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    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.
    • lucb1e 3y ago
      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?
      • nocoiner 3y ago
        A combination of both those factors, but primarily the latter.
  • dd36 3y ago
    I wasn’t making a point, I was asking a question…
    • wmf 3y ago
      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.