People often react to the phrase “carbon footprint” with something about how it’s coined by the fossil fuel industry to direct blame from producers to consumers, but I think there’s still something extremely valuable about looking at emissions per capita -
graph one: total CO2 emissions, NOT per capita, by region. By 2020, China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia are the largest players, with the entire rest of the world barely surpassing China’s emissions.
Graph two: The same regions but weighted per capita.
The US is unique in being extremely emissions-intense per capita while also being large and wealthy. This graph doesn’t count emissions generated in China to produce goods shipped to America - it counts those under China’s emissions.
It’s really hard, I think, for people in the US to have perspective on how wealthy they are on a global scale. Of course no one feels wealthy if they’re struggling to make rent or commuting an hour and a half to afford housing - but on a global scale, when over 700 million people live on less than $2 per day, the median American is one of the richest people on the planet.
If you look at the median individual across the OECD, take out their taxes, and adjust for cost of living by using purchasing power parity to the US dollar, the US median individual has $46,000 of disposable income a year. Only Luxembourg surpasses that (within the OECD)! Germany is at around $33k, the UK at around $25k, Japan around $21k, Mexico around $6k, and the two most populous countries in the world come in with China at $4.5k and India at $2.5k!
(I do need to note that this is disposable income and doesn’t account for the value of services provided with tax money, so countries with a stronger investment in public infrastructure look worse here relative to the US than their inhabitants experience.)
I need to emphasize that while purchasing power parity isn’t a perfect measure, its goal is to allow comparison of how much someone can afford given both cost of living and currency conversion rates.
Someone making federal minimum wage in the US is still able to afford more than twice as much (depending on location within the US) as the median person in Mexico and six times as much as the median person in India. The median person in the US has more than 20 times as much disposable income as the median person in India! When it comes to global warming and the disproportionate impact of the rich on the poor, the issue needs to be viewed in global perspective
this is not to say that someone struggling to make ends meet in the US has, like, a moral obligation to sacrifice further - but that the US as an entire nation bears a huge responsibility for driving its emissions down as a whole, and that it has immense means by which to do so
