that is fascinating - please can you figure out which state South Africa lines up to best...

Whiskerfish

There are some confounding issues with this comparison:

a) It's haphazard how the countries were chosen: for example, Vermont (0.6 mil people) was compared with Cote D'Ivorie (16 + mil, incorrectly called Ivory Coast) while neighboring New Hampshire (1.2 mil) was compared with Estonia (1.6 mil).
Side note: The latter is actually a very favorable comparison, since Estonia is smaller in area and warmer due to the Baltic Sea as opposed to mountainous regions of NH.

b) I think the major issue is the difference in area when comparing carbon emissions per state with populations of the countries. The emissions in many of the other countries are likely lower per capita due to the higher density of the population and lesser need to commute. Which is fair in terms of carbon emissions, but remember that these countries' natural capital in many cases is depleted. I mean that nearly every corner of these countries is either unusable or is used for agriculture and other anthropocentric activities.

However, I do think that this might be an effective graph for a non-discriminating viewer.

I should check these things before I post:

Estonia's area is slightly less than twice that of NH.

Apologies for misinformation.

Whiskerfish, South Africa's emissions are almost exactly the same as California's. CA (which is the most populous state in the US) is the second highest-emitting state, after Texas. Not surprisingly, South Africa is by far the highest emitter in Africa.

Atreyger, my selection of countries was widly haphazard, in a sense. But it was actually a fairly pre-determined process because there are a lot of mid-level emitting states and not that many mid-level emitting countries. So I more or less had to just throw countries on the map when I could find matches. (Otherwise, states like, say, Tennessee would be labelled with the names of about 5 small countries.)

And there's this: there a million different ways to slice this stuff and quibble over it-- Population, land mass, GDP, resource base, history, climate, whatever. (I provided a population comparison because way more people ask for that than anything else.) There's no such thing as a strictly apples-to-apples comparison and I don't really care.

thanks for that! I was thinking it might even be Texas - this country is massively inefficient in the way it uses energy - we have some of the world's largerst coal-fired plants and what is rumoured to be the world's biggest point-source emitter of CO2, the Sasol coal-to-liquid fuel plant at Secunda - Google Earth users will find it at

26deg33min15sec South 29deg09min48sec East

or just type "Secunda, South Africa" into the search box.

Whiskerfish

Per capita emmisions

Sure beats the GOP policy of per GDP emmisions.