China’s pledge to cap greenhouse gas output may curtail car-ownership dreams across the world’s most-populous nation, even as domestic auto sales are on pace to top a record 23 million vehicles in 2014.
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks annual carbon emissions by the world’s two biggest economies, with China’s output almost doubling in the decade since U.S. levels began to fall, according to BP Plc statistics. The middle panel shows the ratio of cars to people, which the World Bank estimates was 69 per 1,000 people in China as of 2011 compared to 786 in the U.S. The lower panel shows the countries’ per-capita CO2 emissions in metric tons, based on Bloomberg calculations from the data.
