Just came across a fascinating and busy international group site called WorldChanging; this post discusses C02 emissions not in terms of output per nations but in terms of output per $1000 GNP, and finds China to be vastly less efficient than the U.S.
In 2003, for example, the chart shows that it takes about 9500 tons of CO2 for the U.S. to produce $1000 in GNP; for the same amount of money, it takes China over 28,000 tons.
Study this post for a time and you'll conclude that what we need to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is to make China a more efficient nation.
But this is an incomplete picture. It ignores the fact that increasingly China is doing the manufacturing work of the world. As the U.S. and European nations prefer to focus on various forms of service industry--some of them quite elaborate, such as the legal system, or movies--they export basic manufacturing to nations with lower labor costs.
Yet the U.S., which has less than a third of the people of China, emits about one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases (last I heard). So if we're talking about solutions, doesn't it make sense for us to look at emissions per capita as well as emissions per $1000? Wouldn't it be easier for individuals in the U.S. to make improvements, rather than for whole industries in China to make improvements?
But it's an interesting discussion and an interesting site. The international group of collaborators looks for "profound positive change" and speak of "karmic rewards." They want to find new ways to cooperate and collaborate as well as new technologies. And they do build their work on a bedrock of science, and clearly know how to write as well as to graph. Worth a look.
