A recently published study that looks at the carbon emissions of traded goods, and which countries those goods trvel from and to, is getting a lot of attention. One good example is the Time article Who Pays for Emissions in Global Trade?:
Popularly, China is a villain in climate change. Many people who attended last year’s chaotic U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen — especially those who belonged to the U.S. delegation — singled out China as the main reason the summit nearly collapsed. Chinese diplomats fought hard against any form of emissions regulation, even though their country is now the world’s No. 1 national carbon emitter, and will emit far more carbon in the future than any other. In Washington, opponents of carbon cap-and-trade also point to China, which is unlikely to take on a carbon cap of its own, and wonder why the U.S. should have to restrain its emissions.
But a new study published in the March 8 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the carbon equation isn’t as straightforward as we might think. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University synthesized carbon emissions and trade patterns and found that more than one-third of CO2 emissions related to the consumption of goods and services in developed countries are actually emitted outside their national borders. Rich nations are essentially outsourcing some of their carbon emissions to developing nations through global trade — by importing goods and services from abroad — thereby shrinking their carbon footprints while inflating those of major exporting nations like China. “It’s surprising just how much this effect is driven by the U.S. and China,” says Steven Davis, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution and the lead author of the PNAS paper. “It is significant.”
…
What’s clear is that for all the blame being put on major developing countries for failing to take on carbon regulations, climate change is still chiefly the responsibility of rich nations. We emitted most of the man-made CO2 currently warming the planet, and even today, thanks to trade, we are still responsible for the majority of new carbon emissions. As Davis and Caldeira write, “Consumption-based accounting of emissions provides grounding for ethical arguments that the most developed countries — as the primary beneficiaries of emissions and with greater ability to pay — should lead the global mitigation effort.” That’s hard to argue with.
I almost don’t know where to begin with this and similar coverage.
First and most trivial: Why are these results so “surprising”? Anyone even remotely aware of the level of international trade, and the fact that developing countries tend to use dirtier energy technologies (as in the very high percentage of China’s electricity that comes from incredibly dirty coal plants) should have expected this outsourcing of CO2 effect to be even greater. I certainly did.
Second, this notion that the importing nations are “responsible” for the emissions created in making the goods they buy is absurd, for one very simple reason that seems to have eluded so many commentators: The importing countries have no control over the energy infrastructures in the exporting countries. Let the US control how China generates the electricity used to make the goods we buy from them, and then it’s reasonable to say we’re responsible for those emissions.
What are the options in this specific situation? China can give the US control over their energy systems, but don’t hold your breath; there’s precisely zero chance of that happening. The US can stop buying goods from China. That doesn’t work for either country; China is as dependent on that trade as the US is, albeit for different reasons. The US can fund the conversion of the energy infrastructure in China. Good luck getting that through the US House or Senate, especially given the trade deficit the US has with China ($226 billion in 2009, out of nearly $300 billion in total imports from China to the US, for example). Or China could fund their own clean energy infrastructure conversion, using the money they make from selling goods to the US and other countries.
Which of those options seems to be the most likely?
We have been ignoring this conveniently. This has come up in debate sporadically but has effectively been tucked away by big corporations with our cooperation for obvious reasons.
It should have been a major debating point leading up to COP15 and wasn’t.
We have to face up to the fact that we are rich because of cheap fossil energy which, we have now discovered, is really probably more expensive than all the rest combine as we face the destruction of the natural world.
The real cost of things slowly come in to focus now for us all. Were all guilty of this whether its a clock radio a car or a house…
Externalized Costs and the $4.99 Radio
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-leonard/the-story-of-stuff-extern_b_490351.html
You’ll get no argument from me on this one: “We have to face up to the fact that we are rich because of cheap fossil energy which, we have now discovered, is really probably more expensive than all the rest combine as we face the destruction of the natural world.”
“Second, this notion that the importing nations are “responsible” for the emissions created in making the goods they buy is absurd for one very simple reason that seems to have eluded so many commentators: The importing countries have no control over the energy infrastructures in the exporting countries.”
I completely disagree. I don’t think many people – at least many people who I know – would say that you’re absolved of guilt over buying sweatshop-manufactured goods because you don’t have direct control over the organisation of working conditions in Indonesian supplies to Nike, or whoever it is. The act of handing over money to someone establishes moral claims on the buyer – this is certainly, for America and Europe, an unfortunate truth, but it’s a truth nevertheless. Of course, whether this moral fact has any tangible consequences for policy is a different matter. It may not be possible for the imbeciles who govern these countries to recognise these moral responsibilities but their failure to see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Again, the sword cuts both ways. Our agriculture creates the principal value we export. We use a tremendous amount of fossil fuels to grow, process and transport agricultural goods for export – so, who bears the responsibility for the carbon emissions which result from our production? Surely the world does not want us to cut back what we are producing, which is infinitely more important than the crapola sold to us by, principally, Walmart which is a major source of their emissions. Both economies, of course, result in the creation of yet more emissions because it takes a lot of people to provide the support functions to produce the goods exported – their factory workers and our farmers both live someplace, which most likely has heat and lights and transportation and water and sewer and roads, etc.
I think our food exports may well trump their crapola exports, but they have more of our debt or dollars than is comfortable for us.
I think about the only “solution” to this, is to ensure that exporting countries (China for example) have similar (or better) standards for CO2 emissions as the importing country (US), otherwise level the importing country should level a CO2 tarrif on those goods to ensure the costs are accounted for. Make it so those products we buy for no labor costs pay for those CO2 emissions like they would have to if they were produced here.
Unless this is done, the cheater’s or slackers will always have a cost advantage – we need to make this game one where the benefits are there if you’re actually doing the lifting and not there if you’re not doing the lifting. This will only be done by setting the rules of the playing field to ensure that.
All that said, I believe Walmart and everyone else that produces stuff in China would fight tooth and nail against just such a thing. Just my $0.02.
I’m no expert but it seems that that’s not the case:
“Consumption-based accounting reveals that substantial CO2 emissions are traded internationally and therefore not included in traditional production-based national emissions inventories. The net effect of trade is the export of emissions from China and other emerging markets to consumers in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. In the large economies of Western Europe, net imported emissions are 20–50% of consumption emissions; the net imported emissions fall to 17.8% and 10.8% in Japan and the United States, respectively. In contrast, net exports represent 22.5% of emissions produced in China. Thus, to the extent that constraints on emissions in developing countries are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.”
From http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/03/the-hidden-global-co2-emissions-of-consumerism/
And whose agriculture is “our agriculture”? I strongly suspect that it’s not mine – the country I was born in is a net importer of food.