Teh stupid...

"Private Pigg" at Iowa Voice, in reference to this article about China's CO2 emissions:

The kicker? China and India are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol, but aren’t required to meet any of the standards as they are “developing” nations (which is the biggest reason why the Kyoto Protocol is such a rag - it doesn’t include the biggest polluters!). ...

Meanwhile, the United States has dropped to sixth in the world in pollution, per capita. Probably because the US was one of the first countries to establish environmental controls.

Uhm...now wouldn't it be nice if the link to DeSmog blog placed the US at number 6 and China at some number less than 6?

The top 10 emitters, on a per capita basis, are:

1. Qatar 53.1 metric tonnes per person per year

2. Trinidad and Tobago 31.9

3. Bahrain 30.6

4. United Arab Emirates 25.1

5. Kuwait 24.6

6. Luxembourg 21.1

7. United States 20.1

8. Australia 18.3

9. Brunei Darussalam 17.7

10. Canada 16.5 ...

By comparison, China's annual per capita emission rate is 2.7 metric tonnes. India's is 1.2.

Hint to the wingnuts who are new to this: if you want to make the case that action on our part is meaningless because big bad China will smother us all in their CO2 emissions anyway, you might want to use these numbers instead of per capita emissions. This places the US at number 1 (23 % of world total CO2 emissions) and China at number 2 (16.5 %). Then you can use the per capita emissions table, which shows the US dropping (20.1 metric tons in 1980, 19.8 in 2003) and China rising (from 1.5 to 3.2) to suggest that China will soon be number 1 because there's so many of them.

Just thought I'd help out a bit...