June 12, 2008: Algae

[Imigo Jones]

Originally Posted by spudcon

We(theUS) put 20 tons of CO2 per year per capita in tha atmosphere, while China, which has a very huge population, are, for the moment, is charge with only 2 tons per year per capita.

spud, from the Times article I was excerpting above:
The average American is responsible for 19.4 tons. Average emissions per person in Russia are 11.8 tons; in the European Union, 8.6 tons; China, 5.1 tons; and India, 1.8 tons. . . . [Earlier] In 2007 China’s emissions were 14 percent higher than those of the United States.

You engineers might smirk, but I like simple "story problems" to recast the numbers . . . :
1
Chinese population / U.S. pop. = 1,322 million (2007 est.) / 301 mil = 4.39
Chinese per cap emissions (tons) / U.S. = 5.1 /19.4 = 0.2629
Pop. ratio X per cap emissions ratio = 4.39 X 0.2629
= 1.15, or close to "14 percent higher" in article

2
(Chinese pop. X per cap emissions) / (U.S. pop. X per cap)
= (1,322 mil X 5.1 tons)/(301 mil X 19.4 tons)
= 6,742.2 million tons / 6,014.0 mil tons
= 1.12, or close to the "14 percent higher" of the article.

CO2 gas is 1.5 times as heavy as air

Even at 1.5 times as heavy as air, it's hard to fathom that each American is "responsible" for 106 pounds per day. I don't disbelieve it--it's just astounding. I totally understand that this is the average of all industrial processes, construction, transportation that occurs--still just astounding!

[Future side research project: How much CO2 per day does the average adult produce simply from respiration? Is it even 1 pound?]

But 106 pounds a day. Really, somebody's wasting a lot of fossil fuels, building stuff, etc. in a way that I would not approve and would never make use of. [Yahoo email smiley with halo not available for linking anymore.] This is not counting distant roadways, schools, and such for the common good. Speaking of cooking with concrete, not sure that all dams (China's, infamously) are really for the common good. Air Force One and presidential candidates criss-crossing the country every week or every day--take a train, you wasteful egomaniacs!



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