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raff7 t1_j5t2us5 wrote

Reply to comment by albymana in [OC] Gobal CO2 emission per income group 1750-2021 by albymana

The issue is that this graph might give a wrong idea..

For example, it shows that now in total upper-middle income people consume more CO2 than upper income ones.. but what does that mean?

If there is just 10 guys in the upper group, and 100k in the upper-middle one, is a very different story than if they are the same size

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Moserboser t1_j5tozvx wrote

Both graphs are necessary to understand the whole problem. The suggested one and this one. A third one with income distribution over the world would aso be good.

The thing that gives a wrong picture is not necessarily the graph itself. It's just context that's missing.

There is one misleading part of the graph though. For Years before at least 1920 there is no clear data on carbon footprint. So this data is speculative and falsely accentuates the change in caron footprint that's happening now.

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raff7 t1_j5tq7h6 wrote

Yea also that.. what were rich people doing in the 1750s that caused so much CO2 emissions? I assume back the most emissions were from fires, and fires were not only from rich people

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PurpleCounter1358 t1_j5xaxnk wrote

They figured out how to use coal to get even richer, lower class people mostly burned wood, which is similar enough to the natural carbon cycle that it doesn't add net CO2 to the atmosphere. Like breathing, not a big deal.

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raff7 t1_j5xur1z wrote

While coal for heating was used for thousands of years, and was not necessarily exclusive to very wealthy people, the cosa usage by rich people started really to take off during the Industrial Revolution, around the mid 19th century..

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PurpleCounter1358 t1_j5z7r43 wrote

Ya, apparently people have burned coal for longer than I realized, but the industrial revolution was when fossil fuel usage took off.

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MatoKoukku t1_j5tyzll wrote

>Both graphs are necessary to understand the whole problem. The suggested one and this one. A third one with income distribution over the world would aso be good.

Exactly. People need to understand both relative (per capita) and absolute shares of emissions. They also need to understand, you cant compare things exactly 1:1, but that relative and absolute shares are useful to look at on national and income group basis.

After that one can ponder as to the reasons for discrepancies, often they are related to energy/economic trajectories. Countries with a lot of fossil fuels stand separately for example. Not the only, but maybe the biggest separator when it comes to relative shares. Then we have a lot of cultural factors.

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