Americans have Texas-sized carbon footprints—here’s why

Enlarge / Fairgoers gather at Big Tex at the State Fair of Texas in 2018. Based on American data, presumably some not-insignificant portion of fairgoers traveled to Dallas in not-the-most-fuel-efficient of vehicles. (credit: Ron Jenkins / The Washington Post / Getty Images)

Greenhouse gas emissions are most commonly reported at the national level, which tends to make us compare nations to other nations. This makes some sense, as national policy can significantly influence emissions trends. But it's easy to forget that borders are just lines on a map, and some lines have considerably more people inside them than others. The citizens of Luxembourg don't ensure their country's low carbon emissions because they're lightyears ahead of the people of China in terms of efficiency-there are just a whole lot fewer of them.

In order to make more meaningful comparisons, you obviously have to calculate emissions per person. And when you do that, the United States really sticks out. (As does Luxembourg, by the way.) It's not surprising that per capita emissions in the United States are much greater than in India, where millions of people still lack electricity. But why are they also much greater than in the wealthier Western nations in Europe?

To answer that question, we need to do more than divide a national total by population. We need to break down the contributions to a person's carbon footprint-the emissions behind the things we buy and do. Doing that in a detailed way is a challenge, and researchers haven't been at it that long. "A lot of the research that's been done has been done quite quickly [with] available data and resources," UC Berkeley's Chris Jones told Ars, "And there really is a lot of work to do."

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