Thirty-two years of fossil carbon, country by country: per person in four snapshots, then in total.
Every country is coloured by its fossil CO₂ emissions per person in 2022, in five classes from under one tonne to more than fifteen. The pattern is about wealth, fuel and climate: oil and gas exporters, cold rich countries and small industrial states at the top; most of Africa and South Asia at the bottom.
Roll back to 1990, the Kyoto baseline year. The Soviet Union and its allies burned coal at Western rates; East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Kazakhstan sit in the top classes. The United States, Canada and Australia are already above fifteen tonnes. China is under two.
A decade later the post-Soviet economies have collapsed and their per-capita emissions with them; Russia and Ukraine drop a class or two. Western Europe starts a slow decline that continues to today. The Gulf states climb.
The decade of China: per-person emissions there triple between 2000 and 2010 as the country becomes the world's factory. The Gulf is now the darkest region on the map, and the first hints of the European decline show: Germany and the United Kingdom are lighter than in 1990.
Fly in on the Arabian Peninsula. Qatar emits 37.9 tonnes of CO₂ per person, Kuwait 25.2, Saudi Arabia 20.7, the United Arab Emirates 20.2, from liquefying gas, desalinating water and air-conditioning cities in a hot climate, with the emissions attributed to small populations. Countries above fifteen tonnes pulse.
Per-person maps flatter big countries. Extrude every country by its total 2022 emissions instead and the picture inverts: China at 11,712 Mt is 31 % of the world, the United States 5,055 Mt, India 2,831 Mt, Russia 1,676 Mt. The Gulf, so dark a chapter ago, is a row of low columns.