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the follow-up question is how make China, US, and EU change direction and reduce emissions. It's clear to me that we need to rethink the way we live currently

This poster emphasizes past accountability and doesn't show recent progress, but the U.S. / E.U. actually have reduced per-capita CO2e emissions since 2000. We still have a lot to make up for, but some credit where it's due. So if we've "changed direction" (maybe, slightly?!) then the next questions might be... Are we moving fast enough? And if we have this "carbon debt", how do we pay it back to other countries/people that are most affected?

And now do the same for the last 120 years.

This is really impressive! Giving me inspiration for my own data. OP, dm me if you'd like to collab on something!

Thank you!

Yeah... but it would take me at least 120 years to clean up the dataset! The 29 year range was used very much out of convenience, because Climate Watch's dataset (with sector splits) only goes back to 1990.

I think the country-level story is pretty similar though for long-term emissions, at least based on Our World In Data and/or Carbon Brief (which Gabrielle Merite uses in her iconic emissions bars).

Interesting how Brazil's emissions nearly disappear from the image when Agriculture and Land Use are excluded.

For sure. TBH, I debated excluding Land Use entirely because it seems so irregular (and my understanding of it is pretty shallow), but it would mean excluding a bunch of negative emissions (the white "puffs" on the small "Land Use / Forestry" plot) so I kept it.

Percapita? Countries dont pollute - people do.

Yup, we (Canada) do really poorly in this regard.

I was legitimately shocked by this.. but, I admit, I was a little satisfied to find Canada's dirty little secret. Our friendly neighbors to the north aren't so friendly to the trees, eh?!

It's pretty much the same as the US + just less dense population thus a little bit more more driving around between places. If you compare it to like Texas or Montana specifically it'd probably be the same or lower.

Countries pass legislation and regulation for industries and people that can influence how much they pollute, and Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit about per capita pollution either. 2 people dumping 20 barrels of oil into the ocean is still doing less damage than 50 people dumping 1 barrel each.

The US and EU have been reducing emissions over this time.

To get China and India to reduce emissions, you'd have to bring them up to the same levels of prosperity as the US and EU. Being environmentally friendly is a luxury that developing countries can't afford.

Missed opportunity. Next time on "Whose Gas is this Anyways?!"

It doesn't have to do with prosperity, it has to do with outsourcing manufacturing so one can greenwash their consumption pattern.

Interesting infographic. However, I find the inner white (sometimes black?) circles to be rather confusing. What do they represent? Why are there so many that are the same diameter within each country? If they’re aren’t many distinctions, then what information are they trying to tell me?

2 people dumping 20 barrels of oil should ST*U on 50 people dumping 1 barrel each. If they really care about Mother Nature, then they should reduce their own pollution first. Simple!

TLDR: White circles are CO2e emissions per 10m people. Black dashed rings and colorful dashed rings show the "fair share" emissions for a single country.

Yeah... in hindsight, the distinction between the white / black circles isn't strong enough.. and there's too much distinction between the black rings and the colorful rings, which are conceptually equivalent.

If you look close, you can see that the black rings are actually dashed rings. They show "fair share" for lesser emitters, so they're the equivalent to the larger colorful, dashed rings for the top 10 emitters. So to show fair share, there are 10 colorful-dashed rings for the top 10 countries and ~220 black-dashed rings for the other ~220 countries.

On the other hand, the white-circle puffs represent actual emissions. Each white-circle puffs show 29 years of emissions, per 10m people from a particular country. This is like cumulative per-capita emissions (so white-circles for a given country are all the same size). Each country has one white circle for every 10 million people (or one proportionately smaller circle for countries with <10m people). So there are ~650 total white-circle puffs for the average ~6.5B world population. The smokey background for the puffs are mainly for mood/tone and differentiating the top 10, but they're also meant to connect the puffs since packed circles leave some gaps.

The idea with the white-circle puffs was that, if we arrange the puffs in a loose hexgrid, the area for all puffs would sum to roughly the area of total emissions for that country, in a way that's comparable to the fair-share rings... and the area of all 650 puffs (including lesser emitters) should sum to the area for total global emissions.

So, for example, the average population for Canada over the period was like ~30 million people, so Canada has 3 white-circle puffs. Canada emitted 4x its "fair share" of CO2e, so you can see that each white-circle puff is quite big, and the total area of their 3 puffs is ~4x the area of their dashed-fair-share ring.

Could you explain why the numbers on the left are different from those in the graphic? On the left it shows China has having emitted 212 Gt, while in the graphic it only shows 1.6 Gt of CO2 emissions. Is the 212 Gt for the whole 29 years and the 1.6 Gt for every 10M people?

Just a poor data and stats student trying to understand this data better. Please and thank you!

Sure! Thanks for the note.

• Left is total emissions for the whole population, over all 29 years.
• Right values are emissions for a single white-circle "puff..." that is, 10M people from the country, over all 29 years (this is like scaled, cumulative per-capita).
• So for China, their average population over the 29 years was ~1.3ish billion people, so they show ~130 "puffs." 130 * 1.6 Gt = ~200ish Gt.

Thanks so much for the explanation, it is greatly appreciated!