THE colder a country is, the more fuel its people burn to keep warm. It
sounds obvious, but this and other simple facts have not made their way into the
Kyoto Protocol, the initiative that aims to curtail the world’s greenhouse gas
emissions and reduce global warming.
Eric Neumayer from the London School of Economics set out to determine if
everyone should have the same rights when it comes to emitting carbon dioxide.
He looked at 160 countries and calculated how their emissions between 1960 and
1989 depended on factors like the winter cold, summer heat, the availability of
fossil…
