| I totally agree that the law was bad in the first place and the companies should have been forced to install those filters. Increasing the efficiency would be a good thing, too, if that wasn't used as an alibi argument for just increasing the plants overall output without doing anything for better efficiency and thus further increasing emissions - which is exactly what I'd imagine them to do...
As for the better perspective: Aside from a bit of w*rk I've spent quite a bit of the day hunting for more data - which proved not too easy... Well, anyway: First I think you didn't account for population density differences between USA and Europe and second I think that the 10% were already wrong to begin with...
Most sources I found (e.g. here, choose country, then select Indicators and "Air & Climate") only state per head emission data. But that's at an average of 10-11 tCO2/year in Western Europe and at about 20 tCO2/year in the USA, so quite different than 10%.
Additionally I found this data of 1995 with a total of 5582 metric megatons of CO2 for the USA and 3721 metric megatons for OECD Europe (I know, that's quite different from just western europe...), again being more than 10%. Population Data to calculate per head emissions can be found here and here, though I imagine that the OECD Europe from the EDGAR documents actually refers to what OECD calls the EU15. In that case EU15 would have had a per head emission of 10 t/yr for 370773 thousand people in 1995, otherwise OECD Europe had 7.3 t/yr for 501704 thousand people, with the USA having 20.7 t/yr for 269945 thousand people (Or 21.2 t/yr for 263082 thousand people respectively) |
