365 Days of Climate Awareness 316 – Major global CO2 emissions

This post began as “Carbon emissions of China”, but that seemed to me too limited (despite these posts’ brevity) because of the predictable, repeated, pattern: increasing annual and cumulative CO₂ emissions as a function of economic activity (excepting the COVID dip). The most encouraging data trends are relative: decreasing carbon intensity in power generation (and overall GDP) and per-capita emissions in many leading economies. The United States and Europe have seen a slight decrease in carbon emissions over the past several years. These decreases, however, are more than overwhelmed by the added emissions of developing countries who want the same benefits of wealth which those already industrialized have.

Annual CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

Despite legitimate progress in efficiency and in renewable energy capacity, human society remains on a runaway track toward self-destruction due to global warming. The feeble pledges associated with the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5°C/2.7°F or less global temperature rise by 2050—with the first global stocktake of greenhouse gas emissions delayed by COVID until 2023—seem unlikely to accomplish much in the face of an unwavering commitment to economic growth.

Per capita CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

Such strides as China has taken in deploying renewable generation capacity are possible only in an authoritarian society such as theirs. Were there a gorge suitable to trap the Mississippi River in a gigantic reservoir and increase the US’ hydropower by nearly half, there is no way 13 cities and 1.4 million people would be forcibly moved to enable it. The United States’ offshore wind “revolution” has it lagging badly behind other countries with economies a fraction of its size, whereas China has leapfrogged the entire world in the past four years.  It is the motive for individual profit which is the foundation of Western capitalism, and has led to the exploitation of whole populations and the planet itself.

Cumulative CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

The cultural roots for these differences are profound and unlikely to change. Speaking geopolitically, since the dawn of history China has had a huge population, an estimated 57 million in year 1 CE, roughly a quarter of the world’s total estimated 232 million. In a country first of warring kingdoms and later an empire hemmed in by enemies to south and especially to the north, securing a stable existence for the population was a ruler’s first concern. That primary motive still obtains today, evidenced by China’s steady, almost inexorable pursuit of global economic resources and the military capability to preserve access to them.

Coal-fueled CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

It is visible in China’s 1949 annexation of Tibet, known as “China’s water tower”, the plateau north of the Himalaya. Much like Israel’s 1967 capture of the Golan Heights, also a regional water source, China secured a vital natural resource as well as a strategic position against its regional opponent, India (or in Israel’s case, Syria). It was a geopolitical act with one goal in mind: securing the livelihood of a giant (1949: 550 million) and growing population.  This was the act of the same country which enacted its (unevenly applied) one-child policy to limit population growth, and now severely limits its people’s access to information and ideas from outside.

Natural gas-fueled CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

Meanwhile, the United States sprang to life in a geopolitically perfect continent with tremendous natural resources, long coasts with deep ports on two major oceans, a well-connected, navigable internal river system spanning 2/3 of the interior, and a native population which was comparatively easy to sweep aside. An aggressive thirst for growth was baked into the national character very early. As whites spread westward first on foot and later by rail, a sense of the power of the individual and of a national manifest destiny became articles of patriotic faith, and find perhaps their ugliest expression in the “American exceptionalism” of today.

Oil-fueled CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

The Chinese look at our individual freedoms, our insistence on self-expression and self-fulfillment as anarchistic and globally hazardous. They look at us in the West as refusing to share or intelligently use our resources, the result being an overconsuming, self-indulgent society incapable of correcting itself, and assured of self-destruction. We in turn look at the authoritarian, tightly controlled society of the Chinese as depriving its people of the things that make life most worth living.

Consumption-based CO₂ emissions: China, US, EU, India & the world.

And so we have arrived in the 21^st century, with (broadly) two competing global orders that share a common environmental problem. The next thirty years will likely tell the story of whether we can collectively adapt.

Carbon intensity of electrical power generation: China, US, EU, India & the world.

Tomorrow: effects of climate change in China.

Be brave, and be well.