Word: co2
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...will not, do anything that would limit India's economic progress," the uneasy exchange illustrated a troubling reality: with less than five months to go before the crucial U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen, there remains a deep chasm between developed and developing nations on the issue of CO2. Unless that gap is narrowed - and the world can find a way to fairly reduce emissions from rich countries while making developing nations pay their fair share - years of global climate-change negotiations could finally collapse. (See pictures of the elephants of India and the rest of Asia...
...them. Ramesh pointed out that even in 2030, India's per capita emissions would still be far lower than levels in developed countries - but sheer population growth means India will become a bigger carbon emitter on the whole. In the future, developing nations will contribute the large majority of CO2 emissions, but if the world has to wait for countries like India to get rich before they begin cutting carbon, the planet is doomed...
Developed countries like the U.S., which refused to ratify the original treaty, are responsible for most of the CO2 in the atmosphere - and more than a century of industrialization has helped make them rich - which would indicate that they should shoulder the lion's share of future emissions reductions. But fast-growing developing nations like China, which has already passed the U.S. as the world's top carbon emitter, will be responsible for the majority of future emissions, so any global treaty that completely exempted them would be worthless. That debate - or standoff, really - has all but paralyzed global climate...
...distribution from each country to estimate the emissions of individuals in each nation. For example, Australia and France have similar income levels - but because Australia uses more carbon-heavy fuels like coal, there are more Australians than French producing high levels of carbon emissions (above 10 metric tons of CO2 a year). The researchers then compiled those numbers to get a global estimate of how carbon emissions are distributed individually; unsurprisingly, about half of the world's emissions in 2008 came from the planet's 700 million richest people. (See the top 10 green stories...
Those numbers could be used by governments to establish a pathway for future emissions reductions. Suppose, for example, we wanted to hit a global emissions target of 30 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2030, or about a 30% cut from the business-as-usual forecast of 42 billion metric tons. That would translate to a global individual emissions cap of 10.8 metric tons of CO2, which 1.13 billion people - less than 15% of the global population in 2030 - would exceed. Emissions-reduction efforts would focus on the well-off people above the cap, whatever country they live in. That...