Comparing USA & China CO2 emissions
- 14 May 2024
- Posted by: Mikki Hall
- Category: energy transition
Robert Bryce has published an interesting review on actual trends in world energy consumption and I make no apologies for using one of his informative Charts to start my short article.
I’ve set about comparing CO2 emissions for the USA and China, once more using Climate Trace’s admirable compilations for 2021 and 2022.
This first image shows the 2022 CO2 emissions for the Oil & Gas, Manufacturing and Power generation sectors – so very specifically excluding Transportation – for the USA. Note the reported volume of 3.15 billion tonnes from 4843 individual sources.
The next image shows the same sectors, also for 2022, for China. Note the reported volume of 11.12 billion tonnes from 4176 individual sources.
It’s pretty well known of course that China burns a lot of coal, much of it mined in-country. This has an impact on China’s CH4 emissions as the mines leak methane and the outcome is shown in this image.
Note 36.15 million tonnes of CH4 from 1187 individual sources.
With respect to Robert Bryce’s image, my thoughts would be that:
- the U.K., Japan and Germany are not influencing the global picture
- the USA’s emissions have dropped, as is well known, largely due to Gas displacing Coal
- the COPs – 15,……,26, 27, 28 have had no impact at all on India and China; their mission has been, and is still, to use Oil, Gas and Coal to lift hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty.
Solving the energy poverty problem lies ahead for Africa where several hundred million people still have no access even to basically adequate supplies of electricity and yet the continent – especially the SubSaharan part of it – has available plentiful supplies of as yet undeveloped Gas.
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