An environmental league table

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This table shows how much gross domestic product a country produces compared to its carbon dioxide emissions. The figure is shown in the third column along - the middle one.

It highlights that China is almost the worst country in the world for caring for the environment. Considering it is also such a massive and populous country, I think that should make us boycott buying Chinese products.

Unless people stand up to China, other countries will go the same way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions

France and Sweden have less emissions per GDP because their people largely work in the service industry, while using goods produced in China. If the factories in China were to close down, those businesses would go back to Europe, or more likely: to Vietnam, India etc, and then GDP/emissions in those places would go down. Somebody is going to produce all the crap we buy.
I think historically Europe would do pretty bad on this chart, but we lost a large part of our manufacturing industries.

As above it's not a case of standing up to China, it's more about changing concepts of modern life.

More appropriate would be design of products that are more resilient, serviceable and updatable. Trouble is that goes against market growth and the marketing enhanced human desire to have new shiny things as often as possible.

New construction standards that enforce technological improvements regarding insulation and energy consumption. Instead we get chocolate box houses with paper thin walls with maximised profits.

Chuck more money at solar power rather than opening new shale oil and fracking fields.

[quote=trollcatman]France and Sweden have less emissions per GDP because their people largely work in the service industry, while using goods produced in China.[/quote]

Almost everyone does that. I suspect the biggest factor is that they don't use much, if any, fossil fuels for electricity production.

[quote=neilson_wheels]New construction standards that enforce technological improvements regarding insulation and energy consumption. Instead we get chocolate box houses with paper thin walls with maximised profits.
[/quote]

Um, we do have building codes that need to be adhered to. Usually improvements that reduce energy consumption are taken in by the market, as it lowers operating costs. Where things get in trouble is when those improvements cost more than what you'll save. Like it or not, increased energy use in total is a fact of life unless we want to turn the clock back a couple hundred years.

So we can funnel more tax money towards a corporate special interest that generated huge quantities of toxic waste for little return?

The poorest countries seem to have the highest ratio. What do you make of that?

That they are too poor to buy fossil fuels on the global market. Most of their population are probably subsistance farmers.
And France is probably doing well on that list because they produce a lot of nuclear energy.

Yeah, that's the attitude, more consumption = progress.

Regarding this information, China is the worlds largest consumer of coal, not surprising really. Apart from mining imports come from Vietnam and other countries. In addition to 70% of power produced by coal fired power stations it is still in household use. Domestic coal burning in urban areas was banned before the olympics were held there, it's still the main source for cooking and heating elsewhere in the country.

In 2012 the International Energy Agency had a budget of 26.6 million Euros and employed 260 staff, I hope they can come up with something better than spewing out unsorted data like this table.

This.

And other issues.

When you glance at the stats you can get euphoric seeing the dramatic drop in the USA's emissions of greenhouse gases over the last 30 years. And you can get indignant at the rise in China's over the same period. But both the euphoria, and the indignation vanish when you realize that both are largely simply the result of US smokestack industry moving to China.

Much of China's pollution really is America's pollution. We outsource our manufacting now- so ofcource we are also outsourcing our pollution.

Nations tend to follow the same curve when industrializing.

The least polluting countries are the two extremes: the poorest, and the richest ( Chad, and Sweden).

The most polluting countries are in the midrange of income ( Brazil, Mexico, both chinas, India).

When you're totally primitive you dont have either productivity nor consumption (niether cars nor factories) so you cant pollute (even if you want to) because you dont have the means to.

But as you rise countries tend to pimp themselves out to industry to attract capital from abroad (or to generate it from within) and seldom stand in the way of development by imposing regulation. So as your income rises so does your pollution.

The two lines rise in lockstep (pollution with gnp) as you go up the income scale of countries.

But then you reach a curious tipping point when even third world people get fed up with pollution and start to pressure the government for environmental laws. At that point pollution starts to level off as income continues to go up, and even starts to go down.

Mexico is now arriving at that point. Its a notorious polluter but it may well start to clean up its act in the coming years.

Finnally you reach the most afluent countries (sweden, Canada, USA) which can afford both regulation and outsourcing and you return to a clean environment similiar to that of the most primitive countries.

China is like Mexico- an upwardly mobile third world country just now arriving at the income midrange. So its to be expected that it would be a major polluter.

^^^^^

I think you should look more at emissions per capita. For example, the USA has much higher emissions per capita than China (19.3 vs 4.9 tonnes). When you look at GDP/emissions China looks bad because their tertiary sector is so small. Even if they keep the same emissions but manage to increase GDP in sectors with low emissions, suddenly their GDP/emissions goes up while pollution remains the same. That is why the US en EU look so bad compared to China, simply because their GDP/capita is so much higher. I find it hard to point the finger at the Chinese, when the US and EU are doing so much worse per capita.

I found the emissions per capita in the last column here: wikipedia

Interesting figures there, with the other table it's just a jumble especially with the ranked figures in the center, just confusing.

That is one of the things France is doing right.

ruveyn