The reduction in percentage means nothing when the difference in the initial number is that huge.
For example this is the gas emission
statistics per capita during 1990 -2005:
United States 23.23 19.9
Germany 14.59 11.0
Japan 9.4 10.55
United Kingdom 12.9 8.45
Why would "per capita" be a valid measurement? Natural CO
2 absorption has nothing to do with the number of humans. I can think of many different units that make much more sense: anthropogenic CO2 emission per tree for example, per unit of surface, or per km
2 of forest destroyed in the past 500 years.Without doing the math, I'm pretty sure the US would score better on those three categories than
Germany, Japan and the UK.
Using "per capita" units gives the false incentive as if doubling the population would be okay as long as the CO
2 emission per person goes up with less than 100%. That's a bad approach, global warming doesn't depend on emissions per person, only total emissions count.
Because that was the entire point of the opening posts...percentages.
That the US has reduced the most in percentage...but in reality in means nothing.
A fat man can improve his 100 meters time from 2 minutes to 30 seconds, a real athlete can barely do 1 second, but the fat guy is not going to get a medal.
Deforestation?in 1630 the area of forest land that would become
the United States was 423 million hectares or about 46
percent of the total land area. By 1907, the area of forest
land had declined to an estimated 307 million hectares or
34 percent of the total land area. Forest area has been relatively
stable since 1907. In 1997, 302 million hectares—
or 33 percent of the total land area of the United States—
was in forest land.
120 million hectares destroyed is equal to 1.2 million km
2 , that's the size of France and Germany glued toghether
So we should rank this based on area? What is fair in that ? Do you want to compete with Russia on this?
Mongolia has a density per km
2 of 1.7, compared to the US at 33.
They should be allowed to burn 20 times as much coal, right?
And people in Monaco or Gibraltar should not be allowed to even fart
Don't get me wrong, I agree that this whole CO
2 emission is getting ridiculous and slowly turning into madness but my point was strictly about their claim of being an example of green technology.