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Comment by mrkeen | Hacker News Reader

It could make more sense to bucket these three together if you're looking for what they have in common.

  Australia     14.5t 
  United States 14.3t
  Canada        14.0t

My guesses are: houses rather than apartments, driving everywhere, percentage of SUVS compared to sedans, meat consumption, general consumerism?

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In the US, we also have large numbers of homes that have not been brought up to modern efficiency standards and cheap/outdated, grossly inefficient heating/cooling contributing. That number could probably be brought down quite significantly without negatively impacting quality of life by “simply” (I’m aware it’s a huge undertaking) properly insulating homes and in urban/suburban areas banning heating/cooling solutions below a certain efficiency threshold.

The tragedy of of this is that these are improvements that would actually improve life in these houses - making them healthier, more comfortable. Trouble is, retrofit is expensive.

I'm Canadian most of our emissions this past year was because of forrest fires.

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