Super-Republican and super-polluters

I have been familiar for several years with the existence of “super-polluter” petrostates whose per capita extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions are hundred of times the global average. Economically, these “super-polluter” ruling classes who sell the fossil fuels profit from runaway ecological distraction caused by unlimited fossil fuel usages to an extent orders of magnitude larger than the average global ruling class. The wealth of these ruling classes, allows them to dictate policy globally to a very high degree — most especially to prevent demands for ecological justice and even for anything except carte blanche to emit however much greenhouse gases their rulers can profit from. The super-polluters of the Persian Gulf — Kuwait, Qaṭar and the UAE — are well documented by emissions figures. They become especially egregious if we debit zero emissions to expatriates and measure emissions per citizen, a perspective implied correct by Arun Saldanha’s ‘A Date with Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Beginnings of the Anthropocene’. By such a calculation, Qaṭar’s per-citizen emissions are 450 times(!) the global average, and those of Kuwait and the UAE around seventy times.

The question of whether other super-polluters exists at a more local level has interested me recently. The fifty states of the United States provide a unique opportunity to examine this possibility, because I have long known of statewide breakdowns of fossil fuel production for coal, oil and natural gas, which can be used to approximate state-by state cumulative and present extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions.

Whilst it was too difficult for me to print all the figures, I have shown for each US state details of:

1. percentage of cumulative US extraction-based emissions
2. percentage of global cumulative extraction-based emissions
3. percent of current US population
4. percent of current US emissions
5. percent or ratio to total US extraction-based emissions per capita
1. I have used percent where the ratio is less than one, and ratio if it is greater
6. percent or ratio to global extraction-based emissions per capita

It might be noted that there are small extraction-based emissions from other sources which I did not calculate for lack of time and unavailability of data. (Extraction-based emissions are not zero for polities producing no fossil fuels currently or cumulatively, which includes a third of US states). Nevertheless, this table should be a clue as to which US state ruling classes are the biggest profiteers from global warming.

I have also shaded “red wall” states in red and “blue wall” states in blue to see how much US political divides relate to actual greenhouse gas emissions.

US Extraction-Based Emissions by State:

State	Percentage of US cumulative emissions	Percentage of global cumulative emissions	Percent of US population (2020s)	Percent of Present US emissions	Percent of or ratio to US per capita emissions	Percent of or ratio to global per capita emissions
Alabama	1.65%	0.36%	1.52%	0.63%	41.526%	1.356784592
Alaska	2.29%	0.50%	0.22%	1.63%	7.463	24.38419474
Arizona	0.31%	0.07%	2.23%	0.00%	0.012%	0.04%
Arkansas	0.46%	0.10%	0.91%	0.47%	51.978%	1.698253119
California	3.59%	0.78%	11.62%	1.08%	9.294%	30.36%
Colorado	2.02%	0.44%	1.76%	3.67%	2.089	6.824671159
Connecticut			1.08%
Delaware			0.31%
Florida	0.08%	0.02%	6.89%	0.01%	0.149%	0.49%
Georgia	0.01%	0.00%	3.29%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Hawaii			0.43%
Idaho	0.05%	0.01%	0.59%	0.00%	0.269%	0.88%
Illinois	4.83%	1.05%	3.74%	1.88%	50.252%	1.641858174
Indiana	1.95%	0.42%	2.04%	1.13%	55.179%	1.802853651
Iowa	0.00%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Kansas	1.30%	0.28%	0.88%	0.37%	42.098%	1.375445865
Kentucky	6.69%	1.45%	1.35%	1.45%	1.071	3.500860065
Louisiana	5.64%	1.22%	1.35%	3.66%	2.700	8.821153759
Maine			0.41%
Maryland	0.29%	0.06%	1.85%	0.06%	3.498%	11.43%
Massachusetts			2.10%
Michigan	0.27%	0.06%	2.99%	0.11%	3.540%	11.57%
Minnesota			1.71%
Mississippi	0.44%	0.10%	0.87%	0.29%	16.721%	54.63%
Missouri	0.04%	0.01%	1.84%	0.00%	0.220%	0.72%
Montana	1.56%	0.34%	0.34%	1.54%	4.607	15.05241983
Nebraska	0.06%	0.01%	0.59%	0.01%	2.153%	7.03%
Nevada	0.01%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.184%	0.60%
New Hampshire			0.42%
New Jersey			2.80%
New Mexico	2.70%	0.59%	0.63%	7.13%	11.355	37.10152528
New York	0.02%	0.01%	5.85%	0.01%	0.194%	0.63%
North Carolina			3.25%
North Dakota	1.72%	0.37%	0.23%	5.23%	22.297	72.84921958
Ohio	3.05%	0.66%	3.50%	2.52%	72.055%	2.35423961
Oklahoma	3.52%	0.76%	1.21%	3.69%	3.057	9.987822025
Oregon	0.00%	0.00%	1.26%	0.20%	15.952%	52.12%
Pennsylvania	12.84%	2.78%	3.85%	9.41%	2.441	7.974852848
Rhode Island			0.33%
South Carolina			1.61%
South Dakota	0.01%	0.00%	0.27%	0.01%	2.777%	9.07%
Tennessee	0.46%	0.10%	2.13%	0.00%	0.219%	0.71%
Texas	16.23%	3.52%	9.22%	24.74%	2.683	8.767608641
Utah	1.15%	0.25%	1.03%	1.10%	1.070	3.495456591
Vermont			0.19%
Virginia	1.82%	0.40%	2.60%	0.61%	23.374%	76.37%
Washington	0.07%	0.02%	2.34%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
West Virginia	10.05%	2.18%	0.52%	6.81%	13.060	42.66954766
Wisconsin			1.76%
Wyoming	10.11%	2.19%	0.17%	13.47%	77.804	254.2074428
Federal offshore	2.71%	0.59%		7.08%

The table above shows a remarkable concentration of US greenhouse gas emissions, and a major political divide:

• Four states account for fifty percent of cumulative US greenhouse gas emissions
• Five states account for 61 percent of current US greenhouse gas emissions
• “Red Wall” states have 22 percent of the US population but produce 64 percent of emissions
• “Blue Wall” states have 34 percent of the population but produce only 9 percent of emissions
• as noted earlier, this figure is an understatement, but even so the “blue wall” states undoubtedly produce low emissions relative to population — lower than the global average

There is definite evidence of “super-polluter” states in Wyoming and perhaps North Dakota, West Virginia and New Mexico. Wyoming is a definite super-polluter, with per capita emissions 250 times the global average, half that of Qaṭar. It is the least populous US state yet the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and third-largest cumulative emitter! North Dakota has per capita emissions comparable to Kuwait or the UAE, and West Virginia and New Mexico about half that. Excluding New Mexico, these have constituted Trump’s three best states in all his presidential campaigns, which is extremely telling. New Mexico is a complicated and very much sui generis state, which Trump did not win in any of his three campaigns and did not even trend Republican in 2024. It has a countercultural mountain culture akin to Colorado or New England in its highest lands, politically detached from the pollution-producing northwest and Plains regions. In the other three the political influence of fossil fuels is as hegemonic as in the Gulf oil monarchies, and this is also likely to be true in Texas and Oklahoma. Even more than with the Gulf states globally, the tax-free or low-tax policies of super-polluting US states limit the range of policies possible elsewhere in the country, as business relocation is easier.

An overview of Wikipedia citation statistics

Although I have known of Wikipedia’s citation templates for some time — it is true that when I first made edits there I either did not use them or they had not been created — it is only recently that I have studied them in detail.

What one might call the “big four” — {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite web}} — have been familiar to me for some years now, because they can be used directly when adding a citation without copying the blank template from the appropriate linked site below. It is only recently though that I have attempted to look at all the templates in “Citation style 1”, and to see if and where I can use them.

A few days ago, I edited an article on the geography of Antarctica and did not know what to do with publications of the Geological Society of London, and of “Scientific Reports”. Presuming by the title that they must be reports of some sort, and seeing they did not fit the criteria to use {{cite report}} (a template I had used before discussing civil rights politics),  I put them under {{cite tech report}} — a rarely-used template found in only a little over two thousand Wikipedia articles (vis-à-vis over a million for the “big four”).

However, re-reading the template for {{cite tech report}}, it was clear to me that the articles I had cited therewith on Geography of Antarctica did not fit the criteria for {{cite tech report}}. They seemed to be closer to {{cite conference}} or {{cite journal}}, although I know nothing about what conference proceedings are.

The problems I had with this made me both message my brother for some discussion and to actually tabulate the frequencies of the various {{cite...}} templates, which I have done below, alongside percentages of Wikipedia pages used and how the template appears in links (if it does do so).

Frequencies and Appearance in Reference Texts of All Style 1 Wikipedia Templates:

Template	# of Wikipedia pages	% of Wikipedia pages	Template in reference text
{{cite arXiv}}	5,865	0.0099%	in link
{{cite AV media}}	61,062	0.10%	as |type=
{{cite AV media notes}}	29,630	0.050%	as |type=
{{cite bioRxiv}}	415	0.00070%	in link
{{cite book}}	1,763,420	3.0%
{{cite CiteSeerX}}	427	0.00072%	in link
{{cite conference}}	19,030	0.032%
{{cite document}}	1,653	0.0028%	as |type=
{{cite encyclopedia}}	219,847	0.37%
{{cite episode}}	18,233	0.031%	as |number=
{{cite interview}}	9,492	0.016%	(Interview)
{{cite journal}}	1,094,239	1.9%
{{cite magazine}}	338,377	0.57%
{{cite mailing list}}	811	0.0014%	(Mailing list)
{{cite map}}	46,609	0.079%	(Map)
{{cite medRxiv}}	159	0.00027%	in link
{{cite news}}	1,734,008	2.9%
{{cite newsgroup}}	653	0.0011%
{{cite podcast}}	5,158	0.0087%	(Podcast)
{{cite press release}}	76,594	0.13%	(Press release)
{{cite report}}	61,348	0.10%	(Report)
{{cite serial}}	279	0.00047%
{{cite sign}}	833	0.0014%	as |medium=
{{cite speech}}	1,426	0.0024%	(Speech)
{{cite SSRN}}	557	0.00094%	in link
{{cite tech report}}	2,351	0.0040%	(Technical report)
{{cite thesis}}	41,638	0.071%	(Thesis)
{{cite web}}	5,013,194	8.5%