Sunday, December 20, 2009

A Graph *EVERYONE* Should See! What I Mean By Carbon Effiency


This is the amount of CO2 released per $ GDP. This is what I have been talking about with respect to carbon effiency. While linear extrapolations are dangerous and oft times stupid, just imagine China with a per capita GDP of America.

Yup. Not purty! The best case scenario then might be the Neo-Oligocene!

2 comments:

davidmaas said...

Very interesting. But the graphic is somewhat misleading. It should have piles of CO2, not money. The money (in GDP) is the constant.

Karl Zimmerman said...

I think the chart may be somewhat misleading. Consider that China, for example, sells a lot of manufactured goods to the U.S. The goods are sold by Chinese subcontractors at a low, lower price. They then filter into the U.S. economy, where they are ultimately sold for a much higher price. Since the demand is U.S. based, the inefficiency is clearly ultimately because of U.S. consumers and their desire for ever-lower prices.

To provide a real picture of the carbon footprint of each nation, you'd need to break out exports according to each country they went to, and assign them to the country which received the exports in question.