The following interactive figure allows you to explore and compare different measures of CO2 emissions and energy consumption for different regions.

• World wide CO2 emissions are steadily increasing even though growth has flatten from 2013 onwards. While there has been a small reduction in OECD countries, there has been substantial growth from Non-OECD countries.

• China’s growth in C02 emissions has been substantial. The increase between 2010 and 2010 exceeds the total emissions of the EU. However, China’s emmissions have plateaued in 2013 and have slightly decreased since then.

• On a per capita basis, China’s emissions have plateaued on a level between Germany and France.

• While still on a much smaller level than China (in particular on a per capita basis), Indias CO2 emmissions are quickly increasing. They more than doubled since 2000.

• US per capita emissions are still far above the level of China or other European countries.
  • We see however a reduction of CO2 emmissions in the US. One reason is the substitution of coal with gas, but also total primary energy consumption has gone down.

• In the EU CO2 emmissions are only slowly decreasing.

• In Germany CO2 emmission almost stagnated the last 8 years, after a soft decline before.
  • In this period renewable energy production has steadily grown.
  • On the other hand, also electricity production by CO2 intensive coal has increased while less electricity has been produced from nuclear energy. In total, German per capita CO2 emmissions is still almost twice as large as France’s, which still heavily on nuclear power in the electrcity sector. (While nuclear power is a great energy source with respect to low carbon emmissions, it has a lot of other problems.)
• It is also interesting to compare total primary energy usage per capita and tonnes CO2 emmission per tonne oil-equivalent of primary energy usage:
  • Germany and the US emmit almost the same amount of CO2 per unit energy, but the US has much larger energy usage per capita.
  • In contrast, Germany and France have relatively similar primary energy consumption per capita, but France uses substantially less carbon per energy unit.
  • While CO2 emmissions per energy unit are recently slowly declining in both OECD and Non-OECD countries, primary energy consumption has quickly increased in Non-OECD countries, albeit, as we see for China and India, still on a much lower per capita level than in Germany, France or the US.
• The CO2 emissions per $ of GDP are generally decreasing, but there are still substantial gaps between countries.

Sources:

The figures are based on publicly available data from BP. Population and GDP (in real 2011 PPP US-Dollar) where taken from the Penn World Tables 9.0 until 2014 and simply imputed for subsequent years assuming constant growth.

The figures are interactive based on the Google Chart Tools. I processed the data and created these pages with R via RStudio using the amazing knitr and googleVis packages.