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
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”.