Sep 5, 20214 min read

An essay about simple questions and complicated answers.

What is the greenest country?

It's a simple, child-like question, and its simplicity suggests there should be a simple and easy answer.

But, of course, our world is not simple, it is a rather complex place and posing simple questions does not make it any more easy to grasp, on the contrary, it adds a layer of complexity to this already complex world.

So, what could/should we mean by 'the greenest country'?

Here are three suggestions:

The country that emits the least amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs)?
The country which generates the least amount of waste?
The country that invests the most in greener technologies?

Greenhouse gases

Annual CO2 emissions by country

If we look at GHG emissions alone,[1]

On the top of the list we find, unsurprisingly, China and the US.

At the bottom of the list we find Nauru,[2] Niue,[3] and Kiribati.[4]

Is it fair (or even meaningful?) to compare Nauru to the US?

[Caveat: The author has never even been to Nauru and only once, very briefly, to the US.]

The next step would be to divide greenhouse gas emissions by the number of inhabitants.[5]

This approach yields some interesting results.

For instance, the Canadians produce the highest amount of GHGs per capita.

Since there are only about 38 million of them, the overall GHG emissions are quite low.

In per capita terms, China's emission is quite low, less than half of that of Canada.

However, since there are some 1.4 billion people living there, China's overall GHG emissions are the largest in the world.

Evidently, the standard of living has to be taken into account.

Which of course adds another layer of problems and questions, namely: How do we measure the 'standard of living'?

And while we are on the subject of 'How do we measure'?

What do we mean by greenhouse gas emissions?

Only that resulting from the production of goods?

Do we take transport into account as well?

Or massive forest fires such as happened in Australia and Brazil?

Waste

When it comes to waste, the picture varies very much depending on the angle from which you observe the problem.

Like for the Greenhouse Gases discussed above, the question 'Which country produces the least amount of waste?' is not going to yield meaningful answers.

Analogous to the above look at GHGs, here too we need to address the question of the total amount of waste and the amount of waste per capita, as well as the question:

'What do we mean by waste?'

Only that which ends up in landfill?

The ratio of recycling to landfill?

And what about waste incineration?

For further insight into the question of waste, we would like to refer you to one of our recent blog articles called "Waste not, want not!".

Click here to read "Waste not, want not!"

Investments

Type 'Green investments by country' into your search engine, and you'll get results such as this:

Global clean energy investment by country [6]

China, the US, and Japan invest most into clean energy.[7]

This could make countries like China and the US look very green, but again without a reference point, the values in the chart do not mean much.

The obvious factor to compare the investments to, is the GDP.

In 2019, the GDP of the three top countries in the above chart (China, the US, and Japan), was 14,400 Billion US $, 21,430 Bn US$, [8], and 5,065 Bn US$ [9], respectively.

Thus, in 2019, China, the US, and Japan invested 0.58, 0.26, and 0.33%, of their respective GDP into clean energy.

That makes China look even greener.

However, what the above chart does not show is that while China is investing quite heavily into green energy it is still expanding its network of coal-fired power stations as well, [7] which makes it look somewhat less green.

NB: We did not even begin to define 'green technology'.

It goes without saying that 'investing into clean energy' (as delineated above) is only one aspect of 'investing into green technology', but what makes a technology green?

What is a green technology?

A more radical definition would be: A 'green' technology is one which obviates the environmental effects of another one.

By way of an example: A case of green technology in the conservative sense would be something that makes livestock (such as cows and pigs) emit (fart) less methane, a GHG.[9]

A case of green technology in the conservative sense would be an acceptable alternative to meat, such as bean-based products.[10]

The suitability of such technologies would of course have to be properly ascertained, for instance, by a life cycle assessment.[11]

So, which country is the greenest now?

It is obvious that neither of these questions alone could satisfactorily frame the aspects and connotations of what we might think of as the 'green-ness' of a country.

Of course, the above treatment is merely scratching the surface of the issue, after all, this is a blog article – not a doctoral thesis.

What we have shown is that we cannot decide which country is the greenest and why that is the case.

Speaking in more general terms, what this little exercise does show is that simple questions do not yield simple answers,