In today's (20/06/07) review of the news over at the European Tribune, we have the following story:

China passes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter (Guardian)

[A]ccording to figures released yesterday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which advises the Dutch government, soaring demand for coal to generate electricity and a surge in cement production have helped to push China's recorded emissions for 2006 beyond those of the US.

The agency said China produced 6,200m tonnes of CO2 last year, compared with 5,800m tonnes from the US. Britain produced about 600m tonnes. But per head of population, China's pollution remains relatively low, about a quarter of that in the US and half that of the UK.

(Note: their report only takes into account carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement manufacturing. The graph on the right comes from a separate article in the Christian Science Monitor - courtesy of Magnifico )

That "relatively low per capita level of emissions" was a very real argument when Kyoto was first drafted, as we were talking about a different order of magnitude in individual emissions, and China had a point when they said that it would be unfair to 'penalize' their development (ignoring right now, of course, the fundamental debate about whether it would actually have 'penalised' them to take a lead over the West in sustainable development) by curbing their emissions - in essence, their argument was to let the first world tackle the problem, which it substantially created, first, before China did anything.

But now, we see that Chinese per capita emissions are equal to half the British ones, and two thirds of the French ones, and are set to overtake the latter before the end of this decade. On current trends, they will catch up with US per capita emissions before 2020. And current trends in that respect are largely driven by regulatory and investment decisions already made or made in the next few years - as regards power production, as regards environmental standards for cars, as regards construction standards and their enforcement - so they no longer have the luxury to wait and see.

UPDATE by Prof. Goose
Tonight President Bush will ask Congress to join him in pursuing the goal of reducing US gasoline consumption by 20% in the next ten years (and petroleum consumption by 10% by 2017--thanks Chris V.). Here is a .pdf (125Kb) of the press release and "the plan."

We don't yet know what President Bush will say specifically in the SOTU speech about environmental issues, climate change or our nation's addiction to oil. However, by tomorrow he may be playing catch up to an array of local, state and private sector efforts to reduce green house gas emissions. Here in New York City and around the country local municipalities are making real commitments to reducing carbon emissions. In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger is trying to reduce the carbon emissions from tailpipes with an ambitious approach to capping carbon emissions and reducing them to 1990 levels by 2020.

And now a group of large corporations looking to reduce their exposure to all these new and varied state and city level legislation have banded together to call for a national limit to carbon emissions set at the Federal level.

Many energy producers and manufacturers have expressed concern that various state efforts, if not coordinated, could lead to a scattershot system of regulation. Others worry that harsher measures, like a stiff tax on fossil fuels, the biggest contributor to global-warming gases, could be imposed if they do not reach a consensus on a legislative approach.

Figure 1

Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.