Hey Pot? This is Kettle, about that Kyoto Protocol...

[Marcellus]

I'm curious, what are the total levels for the entire EU vs the US? I know there have been reports that Cherry pick countries, but the US doesn't exactly get to leave out our most polluting states when we are blamed for ommissions.

I really don't have the answer to this by the way, so I'm not being contentious. Does anyone know the pollusion levels of the EU (every member nation added up) and how it stacks up against the US?

Wikipedia has data on 2002 CO2 emissions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...xide_emissions

Some highlights:

(excludes emissions from overseas territories, etc)

US 5,844,042,000 tonnes (24.3% of total)
EU* 3,682,755,000 tonnes (15.3%)
China 3,513,103,000 tonnes (14.5%)

*Since these data are from 2002, this figure would not include the ten new countries. However, these countries generally have smaller populations and economies than those of the major polluters of the EU.


Just a minor nitpick on the article: not all EU countries are failing to meet their targets. I believe several countries (including the UK) are on track to meet their Kyoto targets, so it's a little unfair to portray all the EU failing. However, the majority of EU members are behind their targets, so the EU as a whole is not on track to meet the targets.

[doc_bean]

Just a minor nitpick on the article: not all EU countries are failing to meet their targets. I believe several countries (including the UK) are on track to meet their Kyoto targets, so it's a little unfair to portray all the EU failing. However, the majority of EU members are behind their targets, so the EU as a whole is not on track to meet the targets.

If we're going to start like that, Belgium's targets were far harder to reach than those of most countries, since a reduction against a certain year is the goal and a lot of countries already had reduced their emissions by the time they signed (so they picked a year where the emissions maxed to compare their progress to), Belgiums emissions had risen between the comparison year and the starting year, so we have to make a bigger reduction than most...

Also, the differences due to po^pulation aren't taken into account enough in my opinion...