said Sunday that the United Sates is the “worst” polluter in the world, especially in producing carbon dioxide.
It was one more example of Iranian state officials simply ignoring readily available data in the drive to paint the United States in the worst possible light.
American emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, are actually falling and China has surpassed the United States as the world’s chief polluter of greenhouse gases.
But facts did not intimidate Mohammad Javad Mohammadi-zadeh when the goal was attacking the United States.
The United States is not only polluting the environment through waging wars, it is also killing people “silently” through emitting the largest volume of carbon dioxide, the environmental official stated.
“If hot bullets have targeted the chests of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, many more silent bullets have targeted the American people—and they are unaware of this,” Mohammadi-zadeh noted.
Even the Tehran Times, a very conservative daily, found this was going much too far. Deep in its article quoting the official, it said, “Contrary to Mohammadi-zadeh, the UN data show China is now the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world.”
It stated that the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) announced in late May that China spurred a jump in global carbon dioxide emissions to their highest recorded level in 2011, offsetting falls in the US and Europe.
CO2 emissions rose by 3.2 percent last year to 31.6 billion tons, the Tehran Times said, quoting preliminary IEA estimates. China made the largest contribution to the global rise, its emissions increasing by 9.3 percent, the paper reported, driven mainly by higher coal use.