• lurklurk@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    This is hugely incorrect

    … equivalent to 281,315 metric tons of CO2. This is roughly the same quantity of emissions that 75 coal-fired power plants produce in a year, and it exceeds the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.

    A single medium sized (1MW) coal power plant outputs about 6.3 million metric tons CO2 per year, so the comparison is three magnitudes off

    I wouldn’t trust any other numbers from that site without verification

    Source

    • astropenguin5@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      So I went and looked at the study they linked for that section, and it had the same number and said the same thing. Their citation for it was the EPA greenhouse gas equivalency calculator, but when I plugged the number into it gave me .072 coal plants for a year.

      I’m guessing what happened is the study fucked it up somehow and the article blindly copied it.

      • lurklurk@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You’re right… The “more than 20 countries” thing, is about 1000x away from the real number too, so I guess they dropped a “kilo” somewhere and somehow didn’t react to getting an obviously absurd result

        • astropenguin5@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Honestly I could maybe believe the 20 countries thing because it is highly dependent on what countries those 20 are and there’s a lot of tiny countries out there

          I think they definitely dropped a kilo somewhere for the numbers they got tho

          • lurklurk@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, the 20th least polluting country is near 1000x worse than the estimated CO2 footprint in the article