Decarbonisation by the Numbers

How good is Australia?

In order to make it even better, we’ve suggested decarbonisation

But why?

Let’s start with some numbers that get quoted all the time – and which are ‘agreed facts’ – that means no one is arguing about them.

Australia contributes 1.3% of the world’s CO2 emissions. (Wikipedia gives the figure as 1.07%, so we’ll take these as upper and lower limits.)

Doesn’t sound like much. But let’s look deeper.

Some more agreed facts: as of January 2020, Australia’s population is approximately 25.5 million.

And the global population in January 2020 sits at around 7.76 billion.

Dividing Australia’s population by the global population, we can see that .33% of the world is populated by Australians.

All things being equal, Australia should be contributing .33% of the world’s CO2 emissions.

But we’re not.

We’re contributing as much as four times that amount.

Every one of us in Australia produces the equivalent of four other human beings elsewhere in the world.

That isn’t at all fair for the rest of the world – all of whom have to live with the climate impacts of our outsized CO2 emissions.

And we suggest that it reflects poorly on us.

Leave a Reply