Carbon Dioxyde is a gas me, you and most of living organisms on earth exhale. It is light, invisible and we generally ignore it (unless you cover your head with the blanket for a minute while in bed).
With all humans weighing about half of gigaton (500,000,000 tons), we manage to emit 40 gigatons (40,000,000,000) of CO2 per year (or 80 times our own weight). Exhaling, unfortunately is not the major source. It is the transformation of our planet into the man-made world of concrete, metal, glass and polymers that does the damage.
Now, CO2 is extremely light, as all gases. 1 ton of CO2 under standard atmosphere (so, at the earth’s surface, or at 101KPa) takes about 556 cubic meters of space!
Imagine if CO2 emitted would be appropriated to each of us equally, that would mean that you and I, each inherit 5 tons of CO2 per year (40×10ꝰ / 8×10ꝰ = 5). That is 2,780m3 of a greenhouse gas per year per person! A cube with a side of 14m. In your lifetime, you will continue “building” your “castle in the sky” out of these cubes and after 80 years of a construction, you and I will be the proud owners of 1 cubic kilometer 3D plot each, warming our hearts as well as the rest of the planet by a few degrees.
OurWorldInData.org is a great source run by the University of Oxford. It allows you to have a deeper understanding of the global trends. It has a set of comprehensive tools for the CO2 emissions and you can see for yourself how your country is doing compared to the world.
Overwhelming amount of emissions comes from the energy sector – more than 73% or 29 gigatons per year (industry 24%, buildings 17,5%, transport 16%). This is by far the first priority to focus on.
On top of that, more than half of the world’s emissions are coming from only these 3 countries: China (31%), USA (13%) and India (7%).
Transforming energy sector from fossil fuels to renewables is an outmost priority for all.
CO2 has been ignored and neglected until the moment it became a killer gas. The gas that will finish human reign on the blue planet unless we learn to emit much less as well as to capture what’s been emitted by us and our predecessors.
Consuming less is the practical and pragmatic answer. The “3R” (reduce, reuse, recycle) is the magic formula for the bright new world that is ahead of us.
What is it that you are ready to forgo to save humans? Don’t worry about the planet, it will live another 7,5 billion years before the sun consumes it. Worry about your children…