6: Putin

What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay No greater challenge faces humanity than reducing emissions without backsliding into preindustrial poverty. One tiny country is leading the way. ......... your carbon bill is world-historically anomalous but normal among your neighbors: 17 tons for transportation, 14 tons for housing, eight tons for food, six tons for services, five tons for goods. ........ A majority of emissions come from just 100 or so corporations, activists argue .......... By any standard, American lives have become excessive and indulgent, full of large homes, long trips, aisles of choices and app-delivered convenience. ........ Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons. In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons). By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons), and places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons. ........... those with a footprint close to zero (Afghanistan, the Central African Republic) and into those around two tons: India, the Philippines. ........ the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living ........ two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming .