One Wong doesn't get it right

It is tradional in many nations for government ministers not to talk down the economies or other attributes of their nation.

Not so, Penny Wong, Australia's Minister for Climate Change and Water. On the television program, Q & A this week she said, (no link available): "Depending on which chart you read, Australia is either first or second with the United States for carbon emissions per capita."

Oh really. Which chart would that be then?

It turns out Ms Wong is not being entirely untruthful, just tricky.

Most charts of carbon emissions per capita look something like this or this with a number of nations ahead of Australia and the United States.

It turns out the chart she is referring to is most likely to be one of these kinds, that excludes developing nations, and assumes we can ignore Luxembourg.

That is, it would have been more accurate for Senator Wong to say that Australia and the United States have the highest carbon emissions per capita in the world apart from Luxembourg if you read a table where other nations that have higher emissions have been left out.

The myth that Australia and the United States have the highest per capita carbon emissions was very successfully propagated late last year in a media release by the Centre for Global Development. It turns out that the CGD is a "think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality by encouraging policy change in the U.S. and other rich countries" and that their study was only about power plants, and that anyone who can find comparative data on any table is doing much better than me.