Efficient polluters should be rewarded, inefficient ones penalized

Yo, Copenhagen delegates: listen up! I got this one covered.

With the climate change conference stalling out this week, I thought I'd give the confused and demoralized world leaders a hand here.

There's a simple, straightforward way to separate the sheep from the goats in terms of polluters. Everyone pollutes; all countries do. But who are the "good guys" whom we should emulate, and who are the "bad guys" whom we should scold?

I figured it out last night with a little help from nationmaster.com, which is advertised as a statistician's dream, and yes, is a pretty cool little website for a guy like me who does this kind of stuff for fun. :)

Okay, we all know that the USA is the biggest polluter in the world (in terms of CO2 emissions), right? Right. But - the USA also has the biggest economy in the world (in terms of GDP), right? Also right.
So, doesn't that let us off the hook? Maybe, maybe not.

To check, let's try to "scale" a country's pollution in terms of the size of the economy that drives it. Let's ratio pollution levels to economic levels, and then see if the USA is a "good guy", or not. To do this, I made up a new stat: GDP ($MM) divided by CO2 (metric tons), or GDP/CO2 for short. The world average happens to be $2,000,000 of Gross Domestic Product per every metric ton of CO2 emissions. That's the whole world we're talking about, now.

But, you say, doesn't the USA dominate the world in terms of economy? Well... no. It's the largest, yes: 27.2% of the world's GDP, to be precise. But in economics, when they teach you about market concentration, it's really not unusual for the largest player in a given market to own about a quarter of it. 27% is hardly monopoly status: it's a big economic world out there!

Well, you ask, if the USA doesn't dominate the world economically, surely it does from a pollution standpoint. Um.. no. It produces 25.2% of the world's CO2 emissions, so pretty close to its share of the world economy. The USA gets a little more "lift" from its pollution than the world in total, but not much. $2.3MM per ton vs. $2.0MM. Yawn. The USA is pretty average as polluters go, in terms of economic activity gained by polluting.

Okay, then, so who are the winners? Which polluting countries get the most economic benefit from their polluting activity? Put another way, who are the most efficient polluters? (if you invert the statistic, make it CO2/GDP, what you get is the tons of pollution per million of GDP, or pollution generated per dollar. Smaller is better - less pollution per dollar is good. Just like larger is better for the GDP/CO2 stat.)

As with any large statistical analysis, there are outliers - data points that are on the fringe with no good explanation for why they're there. The top 5 countries in the world in terms of GDP/CO2 are: Chad, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and Mali. Go figure. And it's not like third-world countries are all "good guys", either. Some of the worst in the world are: Suriname, Nauru, Guyana, Mongolia and Zimbabwe. And the presence of US troops also doesn't seem to matter: Afghanistan is #6 in the world, and Iraq is #178.

Instead of looking at the fringe, let's look instead at the some of the "deciders", who are sitting on their collective thumbs in Copenhagen. How about a comparison among the G20 countries, the 20 largest economies in the world? Are they all monolithically average? Or are there "good guys" and "bad guys" in the group? Maybe we'll widen the sample some; say the top 50 economies (which account for over 90% of the world's economy. FYI, this includes Hungary, but not Egypt.)
What do we find?

Here are the standouts:

Good Guys

Switzerland
Norway
Sweden
France
Denmark (guess Copenhagen was a good place to meet!)
Ireland
Austria

These countries had GDP/CO2 stats ranging from 2-3.5 TIMES as good as the world average. And while not all making the top seven large economies, most of the European Union is better than average. What's with the Nordics, especially? What are they doing right? That's my next step - phase 2 of the analysis. I'll keep the world posted. :)



Bad Guys
(at least one of which refused to sign the treaty or allow for verification - hm, wonder why?)

Russia
China
India
South Africa
Poland
Saudi Arabia
Czech Republic

These countries had GDP/CO2 stats ranging from less than half to only 30% of the world average. The top three on this list (combined) emit more CO2 than the USA, and have a lot less to show for it. They especially need to get slapped silly. But who's gonna do it? Jane & Joe Average in the USA? Barack and Michelle? Doubt it.

Last time I checked, the worst three on this list all have nuclear weapons, and one even sits on the UN Security Council. So it's pretty hard to tell them what to do. But given their level of pollution, until these countries develop a social conscience, the problem will NOT get solved, whether the USA becomes a better world citizen of not.

It's time to face the obvious. It's important for the USA to be responsible, and be among the best in the world at this (and we're not). But that alone will not do the job for the world at large. The bad boys - Russia, China, India - need to shape up and get serious, show committment and transparency, or the climate fight is lost.

That is, if you actually want to fight that battle. If you do, climate control in the USA is not the answer. Emissions in Russia, China and India are the real problem. If the world can get them (and yes, us too) to look like Scandinavia, then we've got it licked.