Measuring carbon footprint

The 2022 United Nations COP27 conference has been flooding us with numbers. We’re now well aware of which countries are the largest polluters. 

The top-ten table shows it in case you wouldn’t remember, and on that list, it highlights countries that manufacture a lot of stuff (China, the US, South Korea, Japan or Germany) and a couple of nasty ones who are just good at polluting and messing up with the rest of the world (Russia and Iran). 

What counts most though is a per-capita CO2 emissions, in which a bunch of nations are emitting exceedingly big. Not so much the number one Palau, a tiny archipelago of Micronesian Island that must have fossil fuel leak somewhere, but Quatar, that’s now is sinisterly on the news everyday,

 We find these two top polluters at the helm again when it comes to ranking per-capita carbon footprint, so one could wonder what these two countries are up to along with their filthy-rich Arab brethren? 

What’s a bit more shocking is to see both Australia and Canada be such large CO2 among other advanced nations and ahead of the United States, that anyone would have suspected to be number one villain. 

Luxembourg flaunt its wealth behind the US, while Switzerland another super-rich European country finds ranks 77th behind Sweden and France, two notoriously frugal countries! 

This per-capita ranking mixes industries with household consumption, so we’ll need to find a way to show a ranking in that category, so ourselves can measure the room that we’ve left for improvement (obviously, I’m talking for the Australians and us, the North Americans). 

We’re still a very long way from number 203 and super frugal Burundi!