[desterothx]

Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?

[myrmidon]

Outsourced manufacturing is much less of a factor than people typically assume:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

US numbers are insanely high because cheap hydrocarbons are locally available (=> bad incentives) and everyone is wealthy (that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations) and also population density is rather low so more energy wasted for transport.

[flakeoil]

> that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations

Well, your theory does not hold at all if you look at Switzerland which pollutes 1/4 of the US per capita. CO2 pollution is not and does not have to be correlated with standard of living.

[myrmidon]

The reality is obviously more complex, and many countries have already managed to somewhat decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions (very good!), but as a crude approximation: More money => everyone gets more stuff => more CO2 emissions (producing and running that stuff).

If you want meaningful CO2/capita comparisons, you also have to be very careful with countries that get ("free") hydro power opportunities for electricity because that distorts the picture massively (same for e.g. Norway).

Big producers of hydrocarbons, on the other hand (like the US) have to work hard to resist the allure of cheap & convenient fossils.

Switzerland is so far ahead in this comparison because they get a lot of CO2-free hydroelectricity (>50%), have to import most hydrocarbons (=> incentive against) and also save massively on transportation because density is much higher.

[gwerbin]

How much of that "decoupling" is actually just "exporting"? Not being glib or dismissive, I think it's an important distinction and I don't know enough about Europe to know how the two compare.

[myrmidon]

> How much of that "decoupling" is actually just "exporting"?

Some fraction certainly is. Here is trade-adjusted CO2 per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

Note how this still trends down for most western industrialized countries despite positive economic growth over the last two decades.

[gwerbin]

There are so many bad incentives all over the place in the USA, and it's not so much that cheap hydrocarbons create them as it fails to prevent them.

Consider the gradual takeover of SUVs on the roads (many which to be fair are probably about as efficient as sedans were 20 years ago, albeit more expensive in real terms and significantly more dangerous for pedestrians), or the heavy reliance on trucking rather than rail for heavy freight transportation between logistics hubs, or the heavy reliance on air for long-distance travel due to having literally zero high-speed rail, or the fear of nuclear power, or the overt political opposition to green energy.

[sarchertech]

The rest of that is true but the US moves a much higher percentage of its freight by rail than almost any large developed country.

Just in comparison to Europe “46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway."

This is in ton-miles, so it’s the metric most directly relevant to emissions.

[myrmidon]

Is this excluding maritime shipping?

According to eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac...) that is two thirds of freight volume and it probably still eclipses even rail transport in CO2 efficiency (until full CO2 free rail electrification), so this probably distorts things completely...

If you actually compare the emission fractions, you can see that the US uses much more CO2 per capita on transport compared to Europe (about 3 times as much!):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-sector?cou...

[sarchertech]

No those include maritime shipping.

This report from Eurostat is where I got my EU numbers.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5711595/KS-D...

Maritime is around 37% if you only include domestic and intra-EU shipping.

Your report include all shipping that passes through any EU country’s EEZ. So if a ship coming from Africa headed to the US passes by the Azores. A portion of the tonne-kilometers of that ships voyage will show up in your report.

If you do the same thing with the US, the percent of maritime freight movement would also skyrocket.