The World’s Biggest Polluters
Posted on Oct 15, 2009 | Comments 16
Here we present a graphical representations of the world’s 20 biggest CO2 emitters, in terms of million metric tonnes.
China has now overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest polluter; its carbon emissions have more than doubled in a decade. However, US and China, world’s biggest polluters, promise to address global climate change at the Climate Change Summit at the UN General Assembly in New York, recently.
India, now the fourth biggest polluter, is also rapidly increasing its emissions, and is increasing its population of 1.15 billion people far faster than any other country; soon its human numbers will be on a par with China’s and its emissions following suit.
image source: maplecroft.com
Australia worst for per capita energy consumption
Australia has overtaken the USA and is now classified most at risk out of 185 countries, according to the CO2 Energy Emissions Index (CEEI), released by UK based, global risks analyst, Maplecroft.
Australians now emit 20.58 tons of CO2 per person annually, whereas American’s emit 19.78 tons, almost a 4% difference. Canada meanwhile emits 18.81 tons per person.
In sharp contrast the emerging markets of China and India, considered two of the world’s worst overall CO2 polluters, annually emit 4.5 and 1.16 tons per person respectively.
[Click on the image for larger view.]
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Filed Under: Eco Systems
Wow, looks like China and US pollute four times as much as the next country down the list.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Digg by nmffffd9: Australians seems to be heavy polluters since they give off the most emissions per capita….
Notice how the circular graph is misaligned so that Russia looks longer than America. Naughty. Also, it should be “USA” not “America”. Canada is part of the American continent.
Stop (reduce) meat consumption … Livestock farming contributes more to global warming than other single factor.
[...] http://www.thenewecologist.com/2009/10/the-worlds-biggest-polluters/ a few seconds ago from firestatus [...]
Stupid way to do it. Per Capita means nothing – you could reduce OZ per capita consumption to zero and it would not make the slightest difference to the CO2 (and others?) in the air.
Per Capita is just a red herring cast out by the major polluters to offset ‘blame’ from themselves. Want to do something about ‘global warming’? Don’t barf on about per capita and reduce the actual amount of CO2 belched into the air. Perhaps the best thing OZ could do is stop exporting coal. That would fix things a bit, wouldn’t it?
[...] Vía | The New Ecologist [...]
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[...] un estudio de la revista The New Ecologist, el ranking de países con más emisiones de CO2 per capita, lo encabeza Australia con 20,58 [...]
Great chart—Americas Quarterly just released something in the same vein that ranks the world’s nations by their environmental policies. You can download it here: http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1036
[...] The world’s biggest polluters [...]
It makes a lot of sense, the world’s most populous countries are the worst polluters.
Population explosion should be addresses also- maybe because this is perhaps one of the major root causes..
[...] blog The New Ecologist aportaba el gráfico que adjuntamos, donde se muestra el ranking en un sólo [...]
[...] For example, one of the products was a recycled umbrella from a high-street brand, it claimed in green printed text, “I am a recycled umbrella, I was once bottle caps.” We speculated that this might not be completely true, unless the manufacturer has found a way to magically turn plastic bottle caps into the steel parts used. The umbrella was manufactured in China, which again could be questionable considering this country is the world’s biggest polluter. [...]
[...] wants us to take up all the slack. China just overtook the US as the top polluter in the world. The World’s Biggest Polluters | The New Ecologist but the problem is the gasoline vehicles, not diesels. North America is the only place in the world [...]