Earth in Peril

Carbon Emissions, 1995
The amount of carbon dioxide polluting our atmosphere has risen 30 percent in the last 200 years as a result of increasing industrial and automobile emissions. Plants convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen, but human activities are now releasing more carbon dioxide than the world's plants can process. This map shows in magenta today's greatest polluters—the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. In the next 50 years, as industrialization increases, many of the purple areas on this map will turn to magenta and the green areas to purple unless stricter emissions standards for factories and cars are put in place.