Sure it is. It also happens to be the amount of climate changing, carbon dioxide we're unleashing into the atmosphere every second, minute, hour, week and it's steadily increasing.
A report from the Associated Press warns that the heralded 2 degree Celsius target limit has become a fantasy.
The amount of heat-trapping pollution the world spewed rose again last year by 3 percent. So scientists say it's now unlikely that global warming can be limited to a couple of degrees, which is an international goal.
...Last year, all the world's nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, according to new international calculations on global emissions published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. That's about a billion tons more than the previous year.
The total amounts to more than 2.4 million pounds (1.1 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide released into the air every second.
China, the country where we've created the industrial powerhouse to make the shit we buy, is the largest emitter (albeit somewhat on our behalf). On a per capita basis, however (as the Chinese always remind us), Chinese emissions are still a modest fraction of American, Australian and Canadian emissions. Oops, checkmate! So that leave us with the overall emissions argument against their 1) outsourced production and 2) per capita emissions arguments. Damn, I think they've got us 2 to 1.
Right now there are one thousand, two hundred new coal-fired power plants on the drawing boards or under construction. The emissions from those twelve hundred new coal-powered plants are estimated to be the equivalent to China's overall emissions today.
What's that saying about how, when you're in a hole and you need to get out, the first thing you must do is stop digging?
No comments:
Post a Comment