[HN Gopher] U.S. per capita carbon emissions are lower now than ...
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U.S. per capita carbon emissions are lower now than in 1918
Author : nabla9
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-08-06 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ourworldindata.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ourworldindata.org)
| godelski wrote:
| Alternative title: US per capita emissions at lowest levels since
| 1964.
|
| I'm not sure which is more accurate but I believe the one I
| proposed is.
|
| It is still a good sign that we're decreasing but I do not think
| the title accurately indicates the state of things and I think
| people assumed it as a smooth curve up then down between 1918 and
| now and not a low and chaotic period between 1918 and 1960. My
| fear is that people often respond to the title and not the
| content. While I'd rather have the latter I think we should make
| title as accurate as possible and understand what assumptions
| people will make.
| [deleted]
| akomtu wrote:
| So it was 15T/person in 1920, then it crossed the 20T mark in 70s
| and now has fallen back to 15T. The catch is that the US
| population has increased quite a lot. Are there similar charts
| for CO2 absorbtion by oceans and trees?
| [deleted]
| _Microft wrote:
| Move the slider to 1921, see how suddenly the current value is
| 24% above that one. It's basically a meaningless, cherrypicked
| point in time that was submitted. This feels misleading at best
| and disingenious at worst.
| zat wrote:
| 1921 encompasses the tail end of a depression, which means
| economic activity was greatly reduced, and you would expect
| emissions to be greatly reduced as a result. 1918 doesn't have
| this issue nearly as bad.
|
| Why not pick a date during the tail end of Great Depression
| instead? Would that have been too obvious?
| seoaeu wrote:
| 1918 marks the last year of a world war and the start of a
| global pandemic. It might not be the tail end of a
| depression, but there's other issues with using it as a
| baseline...
| wmf wrote:
| The all-time high is not cherry-picked and emissions have gone
| down since then while the economy has grown. Decoupling is
| possible and we just need to keep going.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Right. Emissions now lower than when everyone was individually
| burning wood and coal 24 hours a day. Ok? Is that surprising or
| useful or actionable?
| [deleted]
| l332mn wrote:
| They're not, though. Household emissions are many, many times
| larger now. Also wood is not a fossil fuel.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > They're not, though.
|
| Are you saying the data is simply wrong?
|
| > Household emissions are many, many times larger now.
|
| The article is about per capita emissions, not household
| emissions.
|
| > Also wood is not a fossil fuel.
|
| Nobody said it was. What's this got to do with anything?
| l332mn wrote:
| > Are you saying the data is simply wrong?
|
| The data only measures cement production and fossil fuel
| burning, as the caption says. It says nothing about total
| emissions per capita. Hence the title is wrong, yes.
|
| > The article is about per capita emissions, not
| household emissions.
|
| Household emissions contribute the largest share of per
| capita emissions. But hardly any household emissions are
| measured by "cement production and fossil fuel burning".
|
| > Nobody said it was. What's this got to do with
| anything?
|
| Burning wood is carbon neutral.
| l332mn wrote:
| To put it bluntly, what the title says is just not true. This
| graph measures the "burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement
| production". Cement production and burning of fossil fules only.
| Hence it is misleading at best. It doesn't at all include
| household emissions or food production, which represent the
| largest share emissions, probably indirectly around 80%-90% of
| all emissions, if we measure the whole life cycle of products
| consumed.
|
| I.e. what we're seeing here is a tiny fraction of the total
| carbon footprint. Considering that consumption today in terms of
| resources per capita has vastly increased, the title is simply a
| blatantly false statement.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I'm not sure why this measurement would matter very much. Insofar
| as I understand it, the amount of atmosphere doesn't adjust based
| on human population size, so a per capita indicator isn't all
| that useful for most of the reasons one even bothers to keep
| track of carbon emissions in the first place.
| timoth3y wrote:
| It's certainly good that it's down, but if you overlay the charts
| of the US and China, you can see that post-2000, the US reduction
| in CO2 is mirrored by a Chinese increase.
|
| It's unclear how much of the US reduction is due to genuine
| improvements in energy efficiencies and how much is due to simply
| moving a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry offshore.
| version_five wrote:
| I remember politicians where I live congratulating themselves on
| meeting some set of CO2 targets a few years ago. The reality is,
| we lost most of our manufacturing sector, so energy and fuel use
| went down naturally. This chart has no meaning without some kind
| of supply chain adjustment to account for where people get the
| stuff they consume.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Not true. People have done the math and our emissions do not
| change that much if you do it by end product consumption vs
| production.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
| version_five wrote:
| Interesting thanks. I'm curious what the intuition is for
| why. My apparently wrong intuition is that if we're importing
| all our goods, we're incurring the emissions associated with
| their production + transportation in other places.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| A lot of emissions are from transport, electricity
| production, cement production, and heating; none of those
| are offshore
|
| And in terms of manufacturing, while a lot of the labor
| intensive (but more emissions light) manufacturing jobs
| have gone overseas due to lower wages, most heavy industry
| (chemicals, etc) has remained onshore because those
| products are bulky
| RobLach wrote:
| Also 63% higher than 1932. Cherry picked statistical comparison.
| tunesmith wrote:
| (We have 225 million more people now than in 1918)
| [deleted]
| jb1991 wrote:
| Exactly. Per Capita seems somewhat irrelevant here.
| [deleted]
| antisthenes wrote:
| Doesn't take into account transportation and heating with fossil
| fuels.
|
| This gets posted fairly regularly, but I'm not sure what the
| take-away is supposed to be. I think if you post something like
| this, you should at least prompt the discussion to start in some
| way, so that it isn't just a blank graph.
|
| Yes, coal is dying as far as electricity generation goes. Has
| been for a decade.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The graph caption says "Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the
| burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production. Land
| use change is not included."
|
| Is the caption incorrect?
| sanjiwatsuki wrote:
| The metrics don't really change much if you account for CO2
| emissions needed for production/transportation:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita?...
| klysm wrote:
| Probably says more about how many people there are than the
| carbon production.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's interesting to look at the long term trends, especially when
| looking at some of the largest economies on the planet.
|
| Comparing the US[0] and China[1], the US has:
|
| - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973
| (-27%)
|
| - A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
|
| Meanwhile for the same period China has had
|
| - a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
|
| - 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
|
| So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint
| thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
| merrvk wrote:
| Time to invade china and stop them destroying the earth
| CountSessine wrote:
| Or... perhaps just by having everything manufactured in China?
| Which doesn't work so well when you're China?
| nielsbot wrote:
| Or anywhere else in the world, eventually. (Soon?)
| ivalm wrote:
| US exports dirty production to other countries so some of the
| drop is not real (just gets allocated to other countries). Also
| despite this we still produce more than 2x more per capita than
| China.
| l332mn wrote:
| These graphs measures "burning of fossil fuels for energy and
| cement production" only, which only represents a fraction of
| the total emissions in a country. It doesn't measure household
| emissions or food production. It also heavily favours post-
| industrial countries compared to countries still in the process
| of building heavy infrastructure (which requires cement
| production), like China. These data are biased and self-serving
| in that sense. US citizens still consume five times more than
| Chinese citizens in terms of resources, which is unsustainable.
| bookofsand wrote:
| US and China have relatively similar land masses, thus
| arguably similar levels of available resources. China happens
| to have a population 4.2 larger than US, thus 4.2 lower per
| capita resources. If US resource consumption is
| unsustainable, then so is China's.
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