Willem Buiter published an article in the Financial Times on one of my favorite topics of debate: greenhouse gas emissions and the right of equaly pollution per capita.
Everytime someone comes up with the argument that the effects of making ethanol would be dramatics for CO2 emissions I come up with these statistics: an average Brazilian yields 20 times less CO2 emissions than the average American. Moreover: the growth of CO2 emissions of the average America is, despite the fact that he already emits 20 times more CO2, is still 3 times as high as that of the average Brazilian.
But this whole debate gets really interesting when you scrap out the “poor factor” from Willem Buiter’s argumentation, in a mathematical way.
How to do that? Very simpel: you look at the GDP a country produces and devide it by the total CO2 emission of that country.
If you would take the US (14.264.700 million US$ GDP and 5.902,75 million metric tons CO2) as an index 100, you get the following indexes for:
France: 35 (almost 3 times more efficient that the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
China: 330 (more than 3 times less efficient than the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
South Africa: 385 (peforms even worse than the China in making 1 US$ GDP, CO2 wise; this is due to the massive consumption of coal in SA for their electricity)
India: 226 (twice as inefficient as the US in producing 1 US$ GDP CO2 wise)
Brazil scores 57, this puts the country in the class of a developing country like France as to being competitive in creating 1U$ GDP with as little CO2 emission as possible.
Conclusion: Brazil’s low score in emission per capita is much better than India’s low score per capita. Becausse Brazil succeeds creating 1US$ GDP with almost 400% less CO2 emissions than eg. China.
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