~ I love this infographic.
The most surprising one to me is Brazil. All that BRIC attention, all that deforestation of the Amazon, and still their footprint is smaller than Canada, South Africa, Mexico or Iran?
Central America as a region has the smallest footprint; smaller than the Caribbean even.
Once again, one has to admire Bhutan—happy with a small footprint.
Which ones do you find remarkable?
the carbon being put into the atmosphere by Brazil has only been out of the atmosphere for the lifetime of the plants being burned, and lots of it is going back into plants fairly quickly. America and China mostly burn stuff that's been underground for 100M years. Brazil has been particularly aggressive about turning that forest into ethanol fuel, which, when you consider the whole cycle is a lot less efficient than fossil fuels but can in principle have zero net emissions (i.e. sugar cane absorbs CO2 and is turned into fuel--much of which must be burned to produce the ethanol)
ReplyDeletethe Caribbean and central america each have about 40m people (12% of US) and most of them live a much more rural life than most americans.
a growing plant absorbs CO2. it is composed of water, which it mostly gets from the ground, and carbon, which it almost exclusively gets from atmospheric CO2, along with a bunch of trace elements.