A climate essay
Ask who is to blame for climate change and the answers arrive before the question finishes: China. Big companies. Frequent flyers. Somebody else. This page counts the actual tonnes, four different ways, and each way of counting points at a different culprit. The argument only starts to make sense once you can see all four.
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Start with your own intuition. The world will emit about 38.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ this year. What share of it comes from the UK? Drag the slider, then lock in your answer.
Whatever you guessed, hold that number. It is about to be counted four ways, and it will look like an excuse on exactly one of them.
Count one · by country
Count each tonne where the chimney stands and the picture is the familiar one. China emits 12.3 billion tonnes a year, nearly a third of the world total and more than the US, India and Russia combined. The UK sits in 18th place, at 0.8%.
Count two · by head
Divide by population and the leaderboard empties into the Gulf: Qatar, 41 tonnes per person. Among big rich countries, Australia and the US lead at around 14. China drops to 8.7. And the UK? 4.5 tonnes, 50th place, just below the world average. Case closed?
Count three · by history
CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for centuries, so count everything since 1750. Now the United States leads with 435 billion tonnes, half as much again as China. And the UK, where the coal-fired economy was invented, is 5th of all time: 0.8% of today's emissions, 0.9% of the world's people, 4.3% of everything ever emitted.
Count four · by consumption
One more correction. Britain no longer makes its steel, phones or clothes; it imports them, chimneys included. Count each tonne where the product is used and the UK's 4.5 tonnes per head becomes 7.1, a 58% markup, half above the world average. Over a third of the UK's real footprint burns in somebody else's country; about a tenth of China's chimney total burns on behalf of customers abroad.
Four defensible counts, four different offenders: China, Qatar, America, and anyone with a rich-world shopping basket. Whenever someone says our emissions barely matter, they have quietly chosen the one count that flatters them. The UK's 0.8% is real; so is its 4.3% of history and its imported markup.
Country totals hide as much as they show, because emissions track income more tightly than nationality. Here are the world's emissions as 100 equal blocks, divided not by country but by who spends the money.
One hundred blocks, 38.6 billion tonnes. Now sort humanity by income and hand each group its share.
The richest 1% of humanity, roughly 80 million people, account for 17 blocks, mostly through flights, investments and second homes. Average footprint: about 110 tonnes each.
Widen to the richest tenth and it is 48 of the 100 blocks. Nearly half the problem belongs to one person in ten.
The poorest half of humanity, four billion people, share 12 blocks. The average member of the top 1% emits about 70 times more than someone in the bottom half.
Where does that put a Briton? At 7.1 consumption tonnes, above the global middle 40% average of 6.6, and the global top 10% is populated overwhelmingly by people in countries like this one. "Rich country" arguments and "rich people" arguments are, for most readers of this page, the same argument.
Blame settled, sort of. Next question: what activity produces the stuff? The public debate has favourites, straws, flights, food miles. The inventory disagrees about the order.
Energy is almost three quarters of the problem. Not "energy" as in light bulbs: energy for industry (24%), heating and powering buildings (18%), transport (16%), plus the leaks and losses of the energy system itself.
The next slab is food and land: agriculture, deforestation and land use, 18%. Livestock alone emit several times more than every aeroplane on Earth.
Then the awkward industrial rump: cement and chemical processes (5%), where CO₂ comes out of the chemistry itself, and waste (3%).
Now place the things the arguments are about. Aviation: about 2.5% of global CO₂. All plastics ever made and disposed of: 3 to 4%, of which straws are a rounding error. Real tonnes, but the airtime and the tonnage are two very different charts.
Down, finally, to one person: you. When Ipsos asks the public which personal choices cut the most emissions, recycling tops the list, year after year. Here is the public's ranking, followed by what the measurements say each action is worth.
Eight everyday actions, ordered by how effective the public believes they are. Recycling first, light bulbs close behind. The bottom of the perceived list: living without a car.
Add the measured savings, in tonnes of CO₂ per year for one person in a rich country. Recycling everything for a year: 0.2 tonnes. Swapping every bulb for LEDs: 0.1.
Re-sort by what works and the list nearly inverts. Living car-free saves 2.4 tonnes a year, a dozen recycling habits. Skipping one transatlantic round trip: 1.6. Renewable electricity: 1.5. A plant-based diet: 0.8.
The study behind these numbers found one action bigger than all of these combined, having one fewer child, scored at 58.6 tonnes a year. Treat that one with care: it books a descendant's whole lifetime to the parent, and demographers have argued about it ever since. The pattern stands either way: the actions we praise most are the smallest bars on the chart.
Every count in this essay is honest and every count blames someone different. The useful question was never "who is guilty?", it is "which tonnes are cheapest to remove next?", and that question, unlike the blame, has answers.