…is a much heared argument especially in climate change discussions. Take as an example the graph above I came across a while ago about annual CO2 emissions from some bigger countries. The argument, from someone living in a muhch smaller country, went something like:

“And here WE are paying billions from climate action. Yet you cannot even see us in this graph!”.

What this argument fails to take into account is that, surprise surprise, if one country has more people than another country, it’s likely the bigger country also has more total emission. But combating climate change is a global challenge. If the goal is to bring down emissions on a global scale, people around the world should do their part. And that should not simply be dependent on whether you happen to be born in a very small country or a very big one, should it? You would also not argue it’s fine to speed in a car because the number of car accidents in your country pales in comparison to the global stats, right?

A much better way to approach this is to look at per capita emissions, or what an average person in a country causes in terms of CO2 emissions. Only then are we really comparing apples to apples. Low and behold the picture completely changes:

Yes, as a percentage of the total global emissions, China is the biggest polluter, but they also one of the largest populations. When you actually divide these two, emissions are comparable to Europe and lower than the US! The US emits, per capita, roughly 14 tons of CO2 on a yearly basis, compared to 8,9 tons for China, 8 tons for germany, or 4.7 tons for the UK.

Of course, this still remains a very simplified way of looking at a complex situation, even though it is much more fair compared to just absolute emissions per country. What a country or region can do depends on many factors, such as politics, sources of emissions, options for transition for exmaple from a technical perspective, or simply national wealth. The story is immensly complicated and has no simple answers, but using misleading graphs to argue we shouldn’t care at all is utter rubbish.

An equally useless variation of this was made last year on our (small) country’s annual budget and the percentage of funds going to combat climate change or climate adoption strategies, arguing:

“We’re expected to pay billions of Euro’s just for 0,00000001 (or similar) degrees change in global temperature. What a waste of money!”

Again, the issue here is not seeing the global picture and measuring per capita rates. Yes if we were literally the ONLY country implementing climate change measures, that would be silly. But if every country spends this amount per capita, we might make a small difference.