A very interesting paper crossed my desk from The Australia Institute titled, “Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries: Where does Australia stand?” by Hal Turton, a researcher in Environmentally Compatible Energy Strategies at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.

The paper focuses on the following:

“The international climate change community is increasingly turning its attention to proposals to base future greenhouse gas emission reduction obligations at least in part on a per capita principle… This paper reports calculations showing per capita greenhouse gas emissions on a comprehensive basis for all industrialised (Annex I) countries. The data are drawn from national communications and greenhouse gas inventory submissions to the UNFCCC secretariat. The paper presents the most recent and consistent estimates of per capita emissions, covering the years up to and including the year 2001. It also presents historical data on the per capita emissions of all Annex I countries for the years 1990-2001 inclusive.”

The paper concludes that Australia has the highest per capita emissions, Canada has the fastest growth in emissions (since 1990), and the U.S. is relatively high in both categories. Geopolitical events show dramatically in the trend data with large decreases in per capita emissions among counties that comprised the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

The paper has one glaring weakness – it does not discuss uncertainties in the data, which undoubtedly are quite large in comparison to the estimates. For example, scientists who study the carbon cycle disagree about sources and sinks of CO2, sometimes quite dramatically. Even so, the paper provides an interesting compilation of FCCC data, some of which challenges conventional wisdom.