[soVeryTired]

Emissions per GDP is a bit of a weird metric, don't you think? It disguises major variations within individual nations' economies.

It's hardly surprising that a developed-world, service economy would produce fewer emissions per GDP than a developing economy that is geared toward mining and manufacturing.

It's also worth noting that the likely benefactors of those developing-world emissions are the people in developed countries. So even regional estimates of emissions, let alone emissions per GDP, probably miss the point.

[CWuestefeld]

Emissions per GDP is a bit of a weird metric

It seems that way. But considering that so much of the emissions are produced in the course of producing goods, it makes sense to tie the emissions to the production. In the extreme case, where a single nation produces all goods consumed by the world, we'd expect the large portion of global emissions to come from that one nation, and the emissions of the rest of the world to be very significantly lower.

Obviously this isn't perfect. Other activities than production produce emissions - notably transportation. But I believe that those dollars are captured in the GDP total.

I think we then get down to "which people are profligate consumers", and I'm not sure how to factor that in.

[soVeryTired]

But GDP is not the same thing as production of goods. Here's wikipedia's breakdown of US GDP by industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...

These industries are emphatically not equal contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. So it makes little sense to aggregate them and measure the emissions to GDP ratio.

[tonyedgecombe]

Yes, I don't know but would imagine somewhere like China has huge variations between rich and poor areas.