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Who Owns China's Carbon Emissions?
by David Sassoon - Oct 19th, 2007
Do national borders make sense in the international search for solutions to global warming? A new report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says probably not.
The group analyzed China's trade surplus and found that 23% of China's CO2 emissions were from exported goods -- from things the rest of the world consumed. Does it make sense for China to be held accountable for the carbon footprint of just about everything you'll find in a WalMart SuperCenter? Makes you rethink what emissions belong to whom.
Whilst the nation state is at the heart of most international negotiations and treaties, global trade means that a country’s carbon footprint is international. Should countries be concerned with emissions within their borders (as is currently the case), or should they also be responsible for emissions due to the production of goods and services they consume?
That's the question at the heart of the report, and the authors call for the construction of worldwide input/output model. The idea is to take into account each country's imports and exports in order to calculate CO2 emissions based on net consumption of goods and services.
They've done a preliminary analysis of China and found this: 381 million tons of CO2 due to imports, 1490 million tons of CO2 due to exports. The overall effect? 1109 million tons of CO2 emitted by China were created to supply exports to other countries. This accounted for 23% of China's emissions in 2004.
The report begs this question: what would America's carbon footprint look like if we added in all the carbon embedded in the imported goods we consume?
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