Looking at carbon dioxide emissions over the past couple decades, there is no apparent culprit.  All regions and most countries are complicit in the dilemma we face today. 

During the period from 1990 to 2008, carbon dioxide emission increased by nearly 40%, which was driven in large part by global population growth of roughly 27% during the same period. 

The chart below, showing which regions have most contributed to the increase in emissions that we have experienced over the past decade, clearly demonstrates that the emergence of Asia and India (China in particular) onto the global scene has been an overwhelming factor.

Isolating the increase in emissions, roughly 80% of the incremental emission that now flows into the atmosphere as compared to 1990, has really been added in the years proceding the turn of the century, so things have been cranking up lately.

If we single out Asia and India, emissoins out of the collective region have more than doubled in the past 20 years and represent roughly 80% of the increase experienced over this time. 

However, these regions are not wholely to blame.  For one, they delivered nearly 60% of global population growth experienced in the past two decades (>80% if we include the Middle East). 

Secondly, the developed world has been increasingly exporting production to these lands (effectively importing cheap labor and loose environmental standards) for decades.

Simply put, this is their industrial revolution, one not disimilar to the one that benefitted Europe and the US in the 1800s.  Beyond the obvious differnces between then and today (medicine, technology, transportation, etc.), one major differentiator has to do with the laws of large numbers... POPULATION.  The world's population in 1800 was shy of 1 billion people (and also of the combustion engine).  Today we have just recently passed 7 billion by most accounts, with targets of more than 9 billion by 2050. 

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