Which country do you think is polluting the environment the most?

Answer 1

Gotta be the U.S. I heard that the pollution caused by one fighter plane outweighs all invidual conservation efforts put together!

Answer 2

America, the "beautiful", uses a disproportionate amount of the world's resources and, I suspect, dumps more crap into the atmosphere than anywhere else in the world (developing and Third World countries included).
When you consider how many millions of people live in the United States and how many of those people own (and drive) cars (burning fossil fuels), the mind boggles at the amount of pollution pouring into our atmosphere.
The United States is one of the few (major) countries NOT to sign the Kyoto Agreement about global warming (to reduce greenhouse gases -- nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide -- by 2012). Why, I wonder?
The U.S. should be setting an example (and discovering safer, reasonably priced alternatives), not adding to the problem!
We should not be treating Earth, our home, as a toilet or garbage dump!
China and India have far greater populations, but, to date, are nowhere near as polluting as the U.S.

Answer 3

The US is a big polluter because of its size and economy, but other countries benefit so much off of our economy that it could be said that we absorb some of the problem that other countries would shoulder otherwise.

Other countries like Mexico and China have far more lax pollution controls, and that is one of the reasons that some companies have moved their manufacturing operations to those places.

China may have already surpassed the US as the world's biggest polluter, and if they haven't then they probably soon will.

Answer 4

The answer to this question depends on what sort of standard to measure pollution. It also depends on what time-scale you are looking at.

The U.S. is currently a world-leader in many sorts of pollution, such as greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, there are many dangerous organic chemicals whose use is banned in the U.S. but is allowed in many other countries. The U.S. has lots of regulations at all sorts of levels about pollution emissions. They're not as strict as in Europe but they're stricter than in third-world countries.

The biggest polluters by many standards are going to be large countries like China and India--China is the leader in many categories. For example, China has many instances when industries dump toxic chemicals directly into rivers or other ecosystems--things that would never be allowed in the U.S. India was the site of the Bhopal incident, which was the largest industrial accident ever, measured by the number of deaths--so if you are going to look historically, India is a good candidate for #1.

You also have to consider population growth--China is growing so rapidly that it will soon be the world leader in greenhouse emissions, if the rates of growth do not change. Thus, in the long-run, China is a good candidate.

Brazil is another country that would be a good candidate for #1, if you are going to use destruction of valuable ecosystems as a candidate. Although Brazil is not the largest country, it is still pretty huge, and it also has some of the largest area of tropical rainforest, and this rainforest is being destroyed at an alarming rate.

It doesn't make sense to look at the size of a country alone--one should also consider per-size and per-capita pollution. In size considerations, tiny countries like Singapore are probably polluting more per land-mass area than anywhere else. In terms of per-capita considerations, you might end up finding smaller countries in South America or southeast Asia as big culprits. The U.S. is certainly worse than Europe in this respect too.

There's no easy answer to your question--it depends on how you define "polluting" and how you define "most". But I hope this answer can be helpful and lead you to more specific answers to whatever question you are asking.

Answer 5

USA, no doubt at all. They are 6% of the population, and are using 25% of the resources. 23% of all the pollution comes from the USA or is because of the USA.

Answer 6

I seriously doubt it's the USA, except maybe for CO2. And that's only if you believe the global warming nonsense.

I would imagine the country that pollutes the most is China, or possibly India.

Answer 7

The USA pollutes far more than any other country. We spit out almost one fourth of the worlds pollution.

Answer 8

The US. It has about 5% of the world's population and produces 25% of the greenhouse gases. One reason nothing can happen until a new president accepts responsibility and acts. The present one can't as his election campaign was funded by oil, power and auto manufacturers

Answer 9

Per capita the most polution comes from the United States other countries are rapidly catching up though.

Answer 10

At the moment it is the United States, but China is going to take over soon as they consume more and dirtier fossil fuel.