A recent study of global emissions revealed Australians to be the world's worst polluters per capita, producing up to five times as much Carbon Dioxide (CO2) from generating power as China. Coming in second was the United States, with eight tonnes of greenhouse gas per head, which is 16 times more than that which is produced by India. The United States was also found to have produced the most CO2 in total, followed in second by China.

The data was compiled by the Center for Global Development, a U.S.-based organization, based on data presented on the Carbon Monitoring for Action (Carma) website. Carma's site is believed to be the first global inventory of emissions, which looks at 50,000 power stations worldwide.

One of the interesting things that Carma points out is that although U.S. power plants emit the most CO2 (2.5bn tonnes per year), Australian power stations are the least efficient on a per capita basis at 10 tonnes, compared with the U.S. per capita emissions of 8.2 tonnes.

China's emits the second highest total amount of CO2 in the world's power sector, putting 2.4bn tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere annually. However, China's emmissions are far mroe efficient than Australia's, and are only one-fifth of Australia's on a per capita basis.

Researchers at the Center for Global Development are hoping that the online inventory will help the push towards a low carbon future.

Data for power stations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and India all came from official verified reports. For those with lackluster reports, a model was used to calculate the volume of emissions.