China is by far the biggest "exporter" of carbon emissions as seen in this map of the net flow of emissions embodied in trade goods. Many fat black arrows point from exporting nations (bluish) such as China, towards (reddish) Europe, Japan, and the United States. Source: Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science.
PNAS: "Consumption-Based Accounting of CO2 Emissions"
A new study out this week tracks the "carbon footprint of consumption" by looking at outsourced, or offshore carbon emissions, and how the world might more equitably account for them in global treaties. This study offers similarities to one from Princeton last year that tracks carbon emissions among a billion "high emitting" individuals worldwide.
Outsourced emissions is carbon pollution produced in another country on your behalf by someone or some entity: a farm, a factory, a freight shipper. You get the benefits, the goods, and someone else is accountable for cleaning up the waste from its production. The emissions get counted against someone else's or another nation's carbon pollution quota in the world, not yours. The study says that up to a quarter of emissions in developing countries comes from the manufacture of goods for export to wealthy nations.
Similar idea: When chicken farmers cram broilers into closed barns (see: CAFO) to raise on contract for big meat companies, the farmer gets a rate to feed and grow the meat company's birds, but the farmer is left to clean up the manure and deal with the water pollution. (See Food, Inc.: http://www.foodincmovie.com/ ; see: dead zones.) Similarly, a series in 2003 by Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee focused on California's outlawing of toxic environmental processes while still benefiting from the resulting goods: e.g. import oil from elsewhere while banning near offshore oil drilling, keep beaches clean and let someone elsewhere deal with the pollution. ( http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/text.html/ ) The take away of examples and studies such as these is that the price we pay for goods does not reflect the full environmental costs of their creation.
But I digress. The point of this new work by Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira is to help us understand that all those coal-fired power stations built in China and India, e.g., are in good measure generating electricity to build things to sell to us. For sure the Chinese and Indians benefit by making money from the sale of these goods, they create jobs and their economy grows, but we also benefit. In effect the
fancy new iPad you're contemplating carries with it a load of carbon emissions that isn't accounted for in America's annual formidable production of carbon pollution. (Not to mention the land and water damage from the coal mining.) China, or whichever nation builds these glitzy gizmos, will get to account for the carbon debt to Earth's atmosphere. Like the chicken farmer above, China is fully accountable to clean up the carbon "manure". And if the December COP-15 meeting is an indication, the Chinese don't want this cleanup burden left all on their shoulders.
So by buying all these goods from elsewhere we're in effect off-shoring our carbon pollution, and the study authors indicate that future carbon emissions treaties might want to factor in this idea to help reduce inequities between poor, or developing, nations that use a lot of fossil fuels and rich nations that buy goods from these nations. Caldeira and Davis built some computer models to show how the world could apportion carbon emissions among the producers and the buyers. If one looks at the big black arrow in the graphic above that came with the study, one sees that the United States imports a lot of embedded carbon in its trade goods.
This new study, "Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions," was published March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While you're thinking about how to reallocate the debt of carbon pollution in future binding international climate treaties, take a look at a study out last year also published in PNAS. This research from Princeton proposed in a similar vein that we examine carbon emissions not on a nation-by-nation basis, but on a per-person basis. Entitled "Sharing Global Emission Among 1 Billion High Emitters," this study says individual emissions measured by the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of individuals would be the fairest way of accounting for, and limiting its carbon emissions.
Both of these studies look at re-apportioning the cost of carbon pollution: exploring mechanisms for having buyers pay more of the cost of carbon emissions, whether by tracking carbon embedded in global trade products or tracking individual income and the consumption of goods that comes with wealth. At some point perhaps we will be buying things and services based on a carbon price.
PNAS March 8, 2010: Consumption-Based Accounting of CO2 Emissions, by Steven J. Davis and Ken Caldeira.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0906974107
PNAS Study: Sharing Global Emissions Among 1 Billion High Emitters
http://cmi.princeton.edu/co2emissions/
Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative: http://cmi.princeton.edu/
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Caption for image below w/ Princeton High Emitters Study: The Princeton proposal establishes a uniform "cap" on emissions that individuals should not exceed (represented by the green line). If, for example, an international treaty caps global emissions at a certain level, the necessary reductions in global emissions could be achieved if no individual's emissions could exceed a certain "cap." By counting the excess emissions of all the individuals who are projected to surpass the "cap" (red arrows), the proposal provides emissions reduction targets for each country (blue arrows).
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