Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Is the problem really China?

The metric used to measure carbon emissions significantly shapes which countries are seen to bear the lion's share of the blame for anthropogenic climate change. If we look simply at total emissions, then China has recently overtaken the US as the world's major carbon polluter. But of course, such a measure is simplistic, as it takes account of neither historical emissions, nor relative population sizes. Once these are factored in, the list looks very different.

Much is made in some circles of the fact that over the last decade or two, the vast majority of the global increase in carbon emissions has come from China (and to a lesser extent, India). Yet this way of measuring things (enshrined in the Kyoto protocol) attributes emissions to the country of production, not the country of consumption, effectively enabling rich consumer nations to outsource their emissions. This not only gives them an artificial moral superiority based on being able to point to stable or falling emissions (despite rising consumption), but also means outsourcing the health problems associated with carbon-intensive industries. Of course, China has been benefitting economically from this arrangement, and so has been quite willing up to this point to become the world's factory (and increasingly, its banker). I am not exonerating China, simply trying to highlight some illegitimate ways it is sometimes made into a global scapegoat on this issue.

12 comments:

byron smith said...

Anderw Simms: Carbon accounting system is mad as a hatter: "Parliament's environmental audit committee is currently investigating whether there are contradictions between how the UK addresses climate change in its aid programme, and how we behave at home.

"The contradiction is so large that perhaps it is difficult to see. It is the economic model itself. It demands ever more damaging over-consumption by the already rich to deliver shrinking, unreliable benefits to the poor. It's a model in which most benefits accrue to the former, yet without significantly improving life satisfaction, and costs, to the latter. Economic insult is merely added to environmental injury that a large proportion of our current carbon debts (let alone larger historical ones) are borne by others because of an accounting quirk.".

byron smith said...

Tamino: The China Syndrome.

byron smith said...

TCoE: China: crunching some numbers.

byron smith said...

George Monbiot: Pass the Parcel.
"Officially, the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen from 788 million tonnes in 1990 to 566mt in 2009(2). Unofficially, another 253mt should be added to our account(3). That’s the difference between the greenhouse gases released when manufacturing the goods we export and those released when manufacturing the goods we import. The reason why our official figures look better than those of most other nations is that so much of our manufacturing industry has moved overseas. It is this which allows the government to meet its targets. If the stuff we buy is made in China, China gets the blame."

byron smith said...

Guardian: China's environmental report card. This is a broader picture than just carbon emissions, and it is a grave one. China may not bear the lion's share of the blame for climate change, but they are fouling their own nest in all kinds of other ways at an alarming rate in order to provide us with consumer products we generally don't need.

byron smith said...

Reuters: Chinese CO2 emissions rose by more than 10% last year.

byron smith said...

Business Insider: China is a weird place. Check out these ghost towns.

byron smith said...

BI: 18 Facts about China that will blow your mind:

1. China consumes 53% of the world's cement... and 48% of the world's iron ore... and 47% of the world's coal... and the majority of just about every major commodity.

2. China's economy grew 7 times as fast as America's over the past decade (316% growth vs. 43%).

6. China has more pigs than the next 43 pork producing countries combined.

8. America's fastest "high speed" train goes less than half as fast as the new train between Shanghai and Beijing (150 mph vs 302 mph).

9. China's enormous Gobi Desert is the size of Peru and expanding 1,400 square miles per year due to water source depletion, over-foresting, and over-grazing.

10. China has 64 million vacant homes, including entire cities that are empty [see previous comment and link].

15. There are already more Christians in China than Italy (54 million vs 47.4 million).

17. China executes three times as many people as the rest of the world COMBINED... and uses mobile execution vans for efficiency.

byron smith said...

BI: China not so miraculous. Is the Chinese economy set up for a fall? Some very concerning figures here. I don't profess to any great knowledge of either China or economics, but I do know that government incentives to build 60-odd million empty buildings is not a road to long-term prosperity.

byron smith said...

CP: EU, China and US tussle over aviation emissions. EU gets brownie points for trying; China gets a brownie point for starting to talk; US just stays brown.

byron smith said...

CP: US needs to help China avoid environmental disasters. I didn't know that China, who are building the vast majority of the world's new nuclear plants, have no central safety body for their nuclear power.

byron smith said...

Guardian: Why we must retain Kyoto.

"the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a cumulative process, and cumulatively (1900-2007) the EU and the US together were responsible for nearly 54% of the energy-related emissions. China? Just over 9%. It's even more enlightening to factor in the size of the population: the US emitted 1,093 metric tonnes per capita; the EU 572, and China a mere 80."