Carbon Dioxide Emissions Per Capita

CO2 got me thinking in class today, so I thought I’d google emissions per country to see what kinds of numbers we would see. So one of the first websites I ran across was: http://www.breathingearth.net/. This is a fun one to watch when you are bored, but its purpose was a motivational one, telling us to take responsibility for our actions, and our emission rates per country. It was interesting to read why they chose to show emissions per country though, as they stated that, and not per capita. Through per capita readings, it would be easier to point fingers at people who are being extremely irresponsible, but the website’s intentions are not of that, but that to motivate people for a change in attitude towards one of unity and agreement that there needs to be a solution to this problem at hand, and they do so by accepting the blame as they say that the problem stems from Western countries and habits.
Then I found my way to the United Nations Statistics Division, where I was able to hand pick countries and years worth of statistical data on Carbon Dioxide Emissions. I found these insightful:
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=carbon+dioxide+emission&d=MDG&f=seriesRowID%3a751%3bcountryID%3a136%2c156%2c356%2c364%2c368%2c392%2c4%2c414%2c682%2c702%2c784%2c826%2c840%3byear%3a1980%2c1984%2c1994%2c2004&c=2,3,4&s=_countryEnglishNameOrderBy:asc,year:desc&v=1
The values mentioned below are the number of metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted per capita for those years. For example, Kuwait jumped from a value of 18 to 38 over a range of (1980- 2004) 24 years. That’s a change an increase of twenty tons per person in the country of Kuwait in just twenty-four years…WOW! The United Kingdom has been at a steady 10 for the past 24 years, and the United States hasn’t done too horrible in terms of increasing, by remaining in the high teens to a 20 for the past 2 decades (although that’s still pretty high). China, as a surprise to me, had figures less than 5 across the four different years I chose to look at: 1980, 1984, 1994, and 2004, with all the media they get for polluting the world. But then again, they have a high population count, so their numbers wouldn’t be large as say Kuwait’s, whose population is around 2.5 million compared to China’s 1.3 billion.
There are 60 different indicators that apparently go into the calculations of the values we get for comparing countries to their carbon dioxide emissions. These values are measured taking “per capita” into account. It would have been nice to see what indicators were, but I couldn’t find them.
I found another interesting website, which I’ll inform you on soon enough ! So stay tuned, as there is more CO2 knowledge to be gained!