My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1.5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.
The Kyoto Protocol was the first serious effort to not only acknowledging a role of humans in global warming, but to also implement measures to reducing this impact caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, carbon emissions have been rising constantly, largely fuelled by considerable economic growth.
Most emissions in 2020 were produced by far in China (10.668 MtCO2), followed by the USA (4.713 MtCO2), India (2.442 MtCO2), Russia (1.577 MtCO2) and Japan (1031 MtCO2). Iran, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Indonesia complete the top 10.
The highest per capita emissions show a different picture. Here is Qatar, before New Caledonia, Mongolia, Trinidad and Tobago and Brunei. The highest emissions per GDP are produced in Mongolia, followed by Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, Libya and South Africa.
