[borg_]

It blows my mind how much higher US/Canada's per-capita CO2 emission is compared to European industrialized countries as well as China [1].

While we lament how much of this is due to offshoring industries to China, it's also a good sign that carbon-importing countries seem to have been trending down over the past 10 years while carbon-exporting country (China) is leveling off in its emission. My naive read would be that we learned to make more efficient use of carbon while off-shoring is happening.

All countries need to do much more but SOME really need to wake up and do their part!

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

[tialaramex]

US energy use is very high for a number of reasons and energy use will tend to drive CO2 emissions. If you just use electricity (we'll get to that) you can maybe make an order of magnitude difference and maybe if you work very hard, which we need to, two orders of magnitude but that's all you can hope for. That's from 1kg/kWh which is roughly where coal power is, to 100g/kWh and then (very hard) to 10g/kWh with power sources that produce CO2 mainly during construction then amortized over their lifetime.

So if you start out using many times more energy than other countries per capita, you'll struggle to equal them on CO2 emissions even if that's a core policy goal.

The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage. I will walk to the nearby grocery store in a few minutes to buy my week's groceries, many Americans will drive, perhaps as much as an hour, to buy their groceries, it's not as though eating is optional. And this low density also forces bad energy source choices (e.g. using wood fires to keep warm seems pretty reasonable when there is no mains electricity out where you live even though of course it's very inefficient)

But to be fair consumerism does not help. Americans have been somewhat resistant to energy efficiency technologies that took off elsewhere, consumption is a sign of wealth and success and so efficiency is in that sense "bad". The entire city of Las Vegas is clearly a terrible idea from an energy efficiency point of view, why would you build a city in a desert?

[ced]

The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage.

80% of the US lives in "urban" areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...), and that's where most of the emissions are from. It's not geography that causes the low density, it's urban sprawl and culture. Eating might not be optional, but living in a car-centric low-density neighborhood definitely is. It's one of the things our ancestors would consider a luxury, and which our ever-comparing north american minds now treat as a basic necessity.

[borg_]

Thanks for providing this perspective!

I think it would be super interesting to look at CO2 emission per capita broken down by states (i.e. perhaps states along the coasts would show a very different picture than less populated states).

309 people per mi2 (France) vs 421 for the NY state.

[cagenut]

even better, by zipcode: https://coolclimate.org/maps

its astonishing how the difference between "live in a city" and "live in the suburbs outside a city" is more than 3:1

[bzbarsky]

Without controlling for income, it's hard to draw good conclusions here. Looking at the area I am familiar with (Boston and its inner suburbs), CO2 emissions seem to correlate pretty well with income for areas which are a similar distance from downtown Boston and similarly dense/built-up.

Of course there's the open question of whether something like Brookline or even more so Cambridge or Somerville count as "suburbs outside a city".

[ed312]

Also from the area, I get the sense that the Boston area is generally increasing in carbon efficiency (at least pre covid). There simply isn't space to build more/bigger highways into Boston, the only feasible way to expand capacity is increasing density and more transit/biking.

[mFixman]

How much of this difference comes from most Americans travelling to and from work in a car every single day?

The average American pollutes several transatlantic flights per year on commuting alone.

[growlist]

Shale oil/tar sands really are a truly disgusting and ongoing environmental catastrophe for which there can be no reasonable explanation in 2020, and about which Canadians should be ashamed. If there were any justice in the world Canada would have sanctions applied to it over this years ago.

[dade_]

Many are, the oil is being produced for the US market where it is refined. In any case, blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects. Notice US tariffs against Canada for softwood lumber, aluminum, steel, dairy, but NEVER OIL. Makes sense though, the US fund and develop the projects.

So the price of oil is the explanation (trillions of dollars), but everything about the tarsands is insane. The CO2 emissions are probably #3.

The man who invented the technology was horrified, then he died of cancer. Many dangerous chemicals in the mix are being processed and stored beside major rivers in tailing 'ponds'.

The tailing ponds that are actually very large lakes of toxic sludge kill countless birds each year. They installed scarecrows probably 10 years ago.

The natural gas (methane) being burned to extract the tar from the sand with heat is the actual emission of CO2. They were thinking about building nuclear power plants to generate heat instead. This would solve the emissions issue that everyone complains about, but then there would be nuclear waste being generated to create bitumen. This seemed a little too crazy and didn't go anywhere.

Finally, this bitumen needs to be processed, but it doesn't move in a pipeline. So yet another petroleum product is shipped in from the middle east to dissolve it, so it will flow through pipelines to the US for refining and let's face facts here, consumption.

Construction of pipelines, and the ongoing risk of a spill are all added to the list.

But people need to commute to their office job and they can't afford to do that if the price of oil is too high, and it is a hedge against a major disruption in production in the middle east which is only a few Iranian nukes away from reality.

It's all insane, but the CO2 is just lower on the list.

[growlist]

> blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects.

Up to a point - but the UK for example deliberately destroyed its own coal industry partly due to concern over carbon, so I would say it's not completely reasonable to give countries a pass for merely responding to fossil fuel usage generally. Nations can and do take the better choice sometimes.

It's the contrast between the incessant virtue signalling from the Canadian government with the wanton destruction of the environment and harm inflicted on indigenous people that is really sickening.