By Deepak Kumar
Carbon emission statistics, like any other segment data, can be highly misleading. The air in our cities doesn’t smell so good and yet our CO2 emission numbers seem to make it fragrant for us.
According to last published carbon-emission statistics by World Bank, India’s CO2 emissions in 2009 stood at 1.6 metric tons per capita. This compares exceedingly well with, say, the CO2 emissions of 17.3 metric tons per capita of the USA. The USA seems to be at a multiple of 10.8 to us.
This is a highly cited data point that helps us build a make-believe world for ourselves, one that shows India faring much better than the USA on the carbon emissions front. But, let’s try gaining some other perspectives and the picture starts looking a little different.
Taking the populations of the USA and India at 1.24 billion and 315 million, their absolute CO2 emissions would be 1.98 billion metric tons and 5.45 billion metric tons, respectively for a year now (assuming the emissions remained unchanged since 2009).
The US now appears to be at a multiple of 2.8 to us in CO2 emissions, as against 10.8 above.
Let’s now add yet another parameter—that of the geographical areas of the two countries.
The US has a geographical area of 9.6 million sq. km versus India’s 3.2 million sq. km. That implies the USA has a CO2 emissions of 567.7 metric tons per sq. km, whereas India would be emitting 618.7 metric tons of CO2 per sq. km.
This makes us polluting the Planet 1.09 times more than the USA.
So, even when assuming that our emissions haven’t gone up and those of the US haven’t come down since 2009, we are already emitting more CO2 per sq. km than the USA. (Data for earlier years, however, strongly suggest that that India’s CO2 emission has been rising while that of the US has been coming down). In 2008, the per capita emissions were 18.6 metric tons for the US while for India it was 1.5 metric tons. In 2007, it was 19.3 metric tons for the USA and 1.4 metric tons for India.
Moreover, the USA also has a forested area of 3.03 million sq. km, compared with India’s 0.78 million sq. km. In percentage terms too, US has 30.84 percent of its land area covered by forests, whereas India has 23.68 percentage area covered by forests. So we would also be sequestering less CO2 than the US would be doing.
That should also explain why the USA cities seem to have cleaner air than the Indian cities.
We can chose to ignore the obvious realities around us and take solace in statistics which sometimes tell only a small part of the story. Or, we can take some concrete steps to mitigate the situation, which is worsening to a state that could make the environmental and social costs of doing business unsustainable.
The choice, of course, is ours.