We like stats at the Guardian, so we're delighted to be the first to publish – today – the Energy Information Administration's latest round of global emissions figures, covering the year 2006. So much so, in fact, that we created this rather amazing graphic to put the figures into perspective.
The most interesting fact contained in the new data is the change at the top of the list. China, with 6.01 billion tonnes of CO2, has finally overtaken the US, with 5.90 billion tonnes.
It was fairly clear that this was going to happen. Indeed, last year we reported on analysis by the Netherlands Environment Agency that made the same claim. But only now has China's top-spot status been confirmed as part of a complete, globally recognised dataset.
The two main sources for emissions data – the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a US government body, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) – each spend around eighteen months collating and crunching the CO2 figures for every year of data.
I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the press, but the IEA published its most recent figures a few weeks ago. By its reckoning the US still had the number one spot in 2006, with 5.70 billion tonnes compared to China's 5.61.
It's not entirely clear from the documents I have, but as I understand it, these figures are lower because only the EIA data includes the flaring of fossil fuels. This small difference aside, the two datasets show exactly the same trend: American emissions down 2% compared to 2005, with China's up 11%. So it's fairly obvious that China with be the number-one emitter in both lists when the 2007 numbers are released in a year's time.
The EIA and IEA figures both focus exclusively on emissions of CO2 from oil, coal and gas, the burning of which causes around 57% of total global greenhouse emissions according to the 2007 IPCC report. As such, they exclude CO2 emissions from deforestation and cement production as well as methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture and industrial process.
Complete, up-to-date global figures for these non-fossil-fuel emissions don't exist – at least not for the developing world – but it's likely that China would remain firmly at the top of the list even if they were factored in.
Of course, Chinese emissions per person are still much lower than those of the US or the rest of the developed world. Using the EIA figures I calculate these as 4.6 tonnes of CO2 per Chinese citizen in 2006, compared to almost 20 tonnes for the average American in the same year. And that's before you consider that a large slice of Chinese emissions are the result of manufacturing goods destined for the American market.
The difference between China and the US is even more stark if you look at each country's total historical contribution to global warming. According to figures from the WRI, the US has emitted 1088 tonnes of CO2 since 1850 for each of today's Americans; this compared to just 68 historical tonnes for each living Chinese person.
So while today's new emissions figures are interesting and important, we mustn't use them to obscure the fact that global warming is primarily the responsibility of Western countries. China may finally have been confirmed as the modern world's biggest carbon emitter, but does that make it the climate change demon that some commentators like to describe?