If anyone ever tries to claim that China is the world's biggest polluter, show them this graph. We don't even need to get into the per capita statistics or the fact that China is the world's factory and the West has effectively outsourced much of their own pollution to China over the past 40 years. The US alone is responsible for almost double the cumulative historic emissions of China. And taken together the "collective West", despite making up a fraction of the global population is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the entire world's cumulative historic emissions.
Basically the graph in the OP only measures emissions caused by each country's production. An alternative is to measure emissions caused by each country's consumption instead.
"Emissions embedded in trade" basically make up the difference between those two measures. For some countries it can be positive, for others negative, depending on whether they are net importers or exporters.
In short: countries in red outsource their pollution to countries in blue.
cfgaussian in genzedong
Cumulative CO2 emissions by world region
If anyone ever tries to claim that China is the world's biggest polluter, show them this graph. We don't even need to get into the per capita statistics or the fact that China is the world's factory and the West has effectively outsourced much of their own pollution to China over the past 40 years. The US alone is responsible for almost double the cumulative historic emissions of China. And taken together the "collective West", despite making up a fraction of the global population is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the entire world's cumulative historic emissions.
What are "emissions embeded in trade" here?
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/emissions-in-trade-how-we-measure-them/
I'm sorry for using this source but unfortunately this is a fairly good explanation of the concept, and better than the one on Wikipedia.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-trade
Basically the graph in the OP only measures emissions caused by each country's production. An alternative is to measure emissions caused by each country's consumption instead.
"Emissions embedded in trade" basically make up the difference between those two measures. For some countries it can be positive, for others negative, depending on whether they are net importers or exporters.
In short: countries in red outsource their pollution to countries in blue.
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/d4de2130-a0bd-47de-858f-b6d491c75bdc.pnghttps://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e1592766-a6f4-4f23-a7a7-9068d7bd1c29.png Always the same map
Thank you for taking the time to explain!