Where are you? Certainly, the USA is among the worst countries. But that's because developed nations become so by using more energy. Would you want to live in Eritrea and feel proud that you are responsibly doing your part?
Incidentally:
. . . the average world citizen has an eco-footprint of about 2.7 global average hectares while there are only 2.1 global hectare of bioproductive land and water per capita on earth. This means that humanity has already overshot global biocapacity by 30% and now lives unsustainably by depleting stocks of "natural capital"[67]
But we are not the worst offenders. Luxembourg (in the box to the right) is #1 with 15.82 global hectares/person. You'd never guess which country is #2. Aruba at 11.88, Qatar 10.8, Australia 9.31 and the USA, #5 at 8.22. On the other end of this comparison are #188 Eritrea at 0.49 gha/person, Timor-Leste 0.48, Haiti 0.61, Bangladesh 0.72 and #184 Pakistan 0.79. The U.S. has 17 times the ecological footprint (measure of human impact on Earth's ecosystem) of Eritrea.
Want to know how you do? Ecological Footprint will tell you. Click on this. Want to do this yourself, click here. Carbon footprint. Same thing, but click here. However, watch it, for this site wants you to donate money to the cause. They kind of all do.
Relative to time, there is something called Earth Overshoot Day (EOD), the day when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year. After this day, we begin to draw down resource stocks. In 1987, EOD occurred on December 19 In 2017, EOD was August 2, and last year, August 1. Here by country:
The individual who gets most of the flack for having a Godzilla-like ecological footprint is Al Gore. Reports The Daily Signal:
- Gore's 20-room mansion in Tennessee consumes 21.3 times the average household electricity.
- Have you kept track of his travel schedule?
Of course, while all the above is true, The Daily Signal is a conservative website published by The Heritage Foundation.
Liberal publications too cover this footprint issue. The New York Times likes to place the blame on you with these details:
- Fly from New York to Los Angeles and back: melt an additional 64 square feet of Arctic ice/person.
- Reporter Andy Newman (right) took his family of three on a vacation: melted 90 square feet of Arctic ice
- flew from New York to Miami
- drove 600 miles
- stayed in a funky Airbnb
- The average American is responsible for the serious suffering or death of two future people.
- If you cruise instead, the most efficient ships these days still emit 3 to 4 times more carbon dioxide per passenger mile than commercial jets.
- You can, of course, atone for your emission sins by purchasing carbon offsets for $10/metric ton. The money goes to things like planting trees, saving the methane from landfills, building wind farms and capturing the burps and farts of cows. I wonder how they do that.
So back to Donald "Climate Warming is a Hoax" Trump:
Even Donald Trump made this case as a candidate, using it to attack Barack Obama. “You know, he talks about the carbon footprint, OK?” Trump said during a July 2016 campaign speech. “He wants to solve the carbon footprint, but he gets on an old 747 that’s spewing stuff into the air.” (It’s worth noting that Trump’s travel habits are much more ostentatious than Obama’s.)
Trump's campaign planes alone had the footprint of 500 Americans for a year:
Earlier this year:
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!
According to Greenpeace, however, Moore is not a co-founder but rather "a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years."
Moore, who is not a climate scientist but who has degrees in forest biology and ecology, played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years early in the organization's existence, according to Greenpeace's website, but he did not help found it.
- Skeptical Science Weekly Climate Change and Global Warming News: Did you know, for example, that 87% of Americans are unaware there's a scientific consensus on climate change? What is this consensus? 97%!!!
- Here is Gallup poll on American's views on global warming: Download File 190325ClimateChange.pdf (357 KB)
- There's a 99.9999% chance that humans are the cause of global warming, a February study reported. That means we've reached the "gold standard" for certainty, a statistical measure typically used in particle physics.
- How has climate change impacted Earth in 2019, so far?
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