IGM Carbon Emissions

Inter-Galactic Memo

To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: Carbon emissions
9-14-09


Here’s a provocative headline: (Physorg.com)
Australia overtakes US as biggest polluter
Wow. That’s big news. We have cities with more people than Australia, but they’re a bigger polluter. It turns out to be misleading. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?).
The article goes on to say that Australia’s per capita production of carbon dioxide has surpassed our own. Which means that at 20.58 tons of CO2 per year, per person, they are at the top of the list of 185 countries. Of course, we still produce more CO2 than Australia. (And China produces five times as much as we do, but only at a rate of 5.4 tons per person. They just have lots of persons.)
I was curious what my personal contribution was so I looked it up. According to the list I found, we are at about 19 tons per person as of 2006. We were at 19 tons in 1990 as well, so we are doing an excellent job of holding the line. This is in contrast with say, Qatar, which went from 25.2 to 56.2 tons in the same time period. This can be seen as a mark of progress as well, but I doubt anyone would have the bad taste to say as much.
So . . . what’s the point? I mean, who cares? I’m responsible for 19 tons of carbon dioxide. Of course, I didn’t personally put that much out (that would be a lot of exhaling, and I would have had to drive about eight million miles) but someone thinks this is a useful statistic. I don’t. 19 tons times 300,000,000 people comes to 5,700,000,000 tons, or 5.7 billion for the US. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? However, the total percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is .02. Humans contribute around 3% of that. Yet somehow, it is our (humanities) .006% that is destroying the planet. Yeah, I know, it’s all about tipping points. I looked at several other lists from various sources. They differ by as much as 100%. Which kinda makes me suspicious of the accuracy and precision of any of them. They were probably all generated by highly sophisticated computer models. Like the one that predicted the rain forests would be gone by 1990. Here’s a thought: Our heart rate and breathing go way up when we exercise. If we all stopped exercising, or otherwise exerting ourselves, we could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 20% (by my calculations, which means I made it up). But that would mean no more sex . . . . hey, it’s all about sacrifice, right?
Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for my 19 tons. I will try and do better.

(Dave, I kept it to one and a half pages . . . just for you.)