Skip to Content

The U.S. and Europe Are Mostly to Blame for the Climate Conundrum

The future emissions of China and India are of huge global concern, but richer countries are responsible for most of the carbon dioxide humans have added to the atmosphere.
December 2, 2015

A major point of contention during this week’s climate negotiations in Paris is the question of who should be most responsible for the cost of transforming the world’s energy system. And while the need to curb rising emissions from major developing nations is one of the most urgent issues on the table, there is no ignoring the huge amount of heat-trapping gas that richer countries added to the atmosphere well before developing nations began emitting at a high rate.

Fast-growing economies like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia are now among the world’s biggest yearly emitters and will drive most future emissions growth. But from a cumulative standpoint, wealthier nations are way out in front. That’s important, because the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide linger for centuries (see “Climate Change: The Moral Choices”), and the long-term climate consequences will hinge on the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide we emit globally.

In its most recent climate assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that in order for the world to avoid warming of more than 2 °C, the total amount of carbon emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution must be held to less than a trillion metric tons. The panel also reported that by 2011 we’d already emitted just over half that much. Much of that was due to the United States and wealthy European nations. The chart below shows the cumulative emissions since 1850 for each of today’s top nine yearly emitters (listed left to right).

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.