There are lots of ways to stack up countries in terms of environmental efficiency.

Obviously, you could look simply at the amount of greenhouse gases each country emits. At the top of that list are countries like China, India, and the US which are both major emitters and major population centers. Looking just at the amount of greenhouse gases each country emits doesn’t really tell you much about its efficiency, it tells you more about its population size.

So, to adjust for population you could look at per capita emissions. This list will take the population centers like China off the top of the list, but ends up looking a like a list of countries by level of industrialization. This is an interesting metric, but if our goal from examining this data is to look for countries that are models of emissions efficiency the countries with the lowest per capita emissions aren’t much help. The lowest per capita emissions countries are largely less developed African countries – Eritrea, Chad, and the DRC top the list and don’t really represent a model that the western world can emulate. So, to adjust for development I added Gross Domestic Product into the mix. I calculated how many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted by a country per billion dollars of GDP produced. This graph gives you some idea of countries stack up in the environmental cost of their wealth generation.

The problem with using a map to illustrate each country’s environmental efficiency its hard to pick out how the smaller countries stack up. In fact, the leader in environmental efficiency by this measure is Puerto Rico, which is pretty tough to make out from the map. Overall, small island nations scored extremely high on this measure. I excluded small island nations of less than 500,000 people, which left just Puerto Rico at the top. Oddly enough, Puerto Rico’s power grid is almost entirely coal based. Long story short, I don’t think we should turn to Puerto Rico just yet as a beacon of green economics.

The rest of the list makes a lot more intuitive sense. Switzerland is huge hydroelectric producer, Norway has vowed carbon neutrality by 2030 and Sweden is a nuclear power early adopter and has focused on wind, hydroelectric, and tidal power sources in recent years (and check out their plummeting CO2 emissions!). Other highlights on the list are Costa Rica, which has been running on 100% renewable energy for over a year and France who generates more than 70% of its from nuclear sources .

The upshot here, as I see it, is that it is possible to grow an economy without growing emissions, and that the renewable technologies we have available to us now are viable methods to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.