We may have 100% clean energy locally only because we've outsourced the dirty one.
We have outsourced it because they have been undercutting local producers in pollution, labor, human rights standards. Therefore bringing back manufacturing and taxing them is a much better solution overall than bringing more extreme measures to our already pretty "green" region.
However the other important factor here is the trend line. Most western countries above China in this ranking has a trend line pointing downwards, while China still has a trend line pointing upwards. So if both China and the US continue on their current paths then China will indeed soon surpass the US.
It would seem that manufacturing would have a significant impact on the figures and a lot of manufacturing has been outsourced to China/India.
So how much of all the stuff that is bought and consumed in the EU/USA is actually produced in China or India?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
That same article lists the EU overall at 8.6 and US at 17.
The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China which has 1.2B people.
China: 7.5
And EU is about 500 million people.
Source: 2014 numbers from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pc
It counts toward China's emissions total. Whilst having reduced EU or US contribution comparatively speaking. We globalised manufacturing emissions, and most of them ended up in China.
The simple fact is no one can claim their halo - everyone, everywhere has a part in the solution, and we can find failings to criticise everywhere too.
Maybe Orkney got closest to their get out of jail card, but they're tiny.
Not that I disagree, but it is not just Europeans' choice to buy from China, but also Chineses' choice not to sell.
How did you get to that number? EU is about 500 million people, The US and Canada is about 350, Add in any other countries you might consider 'western' and that's another 50-100 million.
By people who apparently don't even know the meaning of the word.
> The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China which has 1.2B people.
The western world has a much larger population, but I'd like to see you back that claim up with reproducible numbers.
It's a fact that CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly (per capita and absolutely) while the "western world" is mostly reducing them and has been doing that for many years. Also, we have to rely on China's "official data", which may or may not be correct.
If it's a fact you should be able to cite a source?
> Also, we have to rely on China's "official data", which may or may not be correct.
The rest of the world is more than capable of monitoring China's emissions using satellite data.
China rapidly tripled their emissions from 2000 to 2010, but after 2011 they have hardly increased at all.
Second graph here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-chinas-co2-emissions-...
Report dated 30 Nov 2018
"China is positioning itself as a global climate leader, and its actions have an enormous impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. Discouragingly, a rise in coal consumption drove Chinese CO2 emissions to a new high in 2017, which will likely be exceeded again in 2018."
If there was a "made with renewable energy" certification on products, I'd certainly consider paying a premium and even being inconvenienced into finding them.
Maybe even a version of the better world shopper (https://betterworldshopper.org/) which does exclusively energy grades and then have forward-thinking grocery stores start to to put the grade on the label.
I'd certainly shop at a store with that system at every conceivable opportunity.
Reasonable approaches would be to bring manufacturing back to countries that use mostly clean energy (oh, and modern approaches to labor and human rights) and to tax imports from developing countries with poor CO2 record heavily until they fix their issues.