China now No. 1

(Q) China has overtaken the USA to become the world's No. 1 industrial source of carbon dioxide, the most important global-warming pollutant, according to a scientific study to be published today.
The study and two others — one recently published and another coming — agree that China's carbon-dioxide emissions surpassed those in the USA in 2006. That's decades earlier than had been predicted by the International Energy Agency four years ago.

All three studies examine emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal. Energy usage is the most significant man-made source of carbon dioxide, which accumulates in the atmosphere and traps heat.

Unless China sharply cuts its emissions, "the situation is pretty bleak," says Richard Carson of the University of California, co-author of a study in today's Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. "There's a lot less time to do something than people previously thought."

China's total emissions in 2006 roughly tied U.S. emissions, according to another study in the April 24 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. But China's monthly production of carbon dioxide overtook the USA's in mid-2006, the study says. "Nobody could anticipate the rate of growth that's taken place in the last six or eight years in China," says Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the authors of that study. Courtesy USA Today