The Northern Territory is the heaviest emitter of CO2 per capita in the world and the Beetaloo Basin LNG project will only make it worse
This kind of statistic bugs me.
The people of NT are probably not using/emitting any more CO2 than you or me. It’s the companies that are sucking gas out of the ground, and per capita is IRRELEVANT.
So, why not use a denominator that’s actually useful?
Showing it as per capita helps great polluters shift the blame to the common people and foster doomerism.
Or the journalist that wrote this doesn’t understand statistics.
It’s relevant in so far as what it says about the extreme carbon intensity of the NT’s economic activity and the current plans to increase that dependence even further.
Per capita is not necessarily relevant from an environmental standpoint directly but it means quite a lot when it comes to gathering the political will to end these emissions and our uncounted carbon exports.
So they cherrypicked this as something to pick on NT about? While implying that the other states are ‘not so bad’? Why should VIC or NSW do anything when NT is twice as bad? And worse than all those petro states too!
If they want to be truthful, they’d just say “NT has the smallest production and the largest reserves in Australia, and we want to stop that”.
Per capita when the population is low, the area is large and the number of emitters is relatively high is a bit of a statistics trick though.
The emissions are not from the population themselves so it’s an irrelevant number, if the population goes down the per capita emissions will go up. you could say a million people moved to the NT and the emissions would plummet.
It does seem a bit of clickbaity way to present the data. Thankfully most people here seem to have read past the headline.
I take great exception to per capita values. In the overall picture it bears little relevance, the total output is the most important value. We need to do better on emissions as a nation, but even if we could somehow get to zero emissions out would still only be a drop in the ocean as part of global emissions.
I take great exception to per capita values. In the overall picture it bears little relevance, the total output is the most important value.
Per capita values can be used to tell you where to focus your effort though, provided it’s coupled with an understanding of why the value may be high (which this article gives).
Surprising - and this is only for LNG extraction and shipment. It doesn’t count the combustion at point of use.
The entire NT has the same population as Gelong.
Sure, NT’s emissions are worse than Gelong’s emissions… but both are a drop in the bucket compared to the national emissions.
If NT became zero emission overnight, it would barely move the needle on global emissions. Also the way you’d do that is by reducing demand for fossil fuels elsewhere.
