George Monbiot points out that Britain is accomplishing some of its reductions in carbon emissions by the simple expedient of outsourcing them to other countries:
• George Monbiot, Pass the Parcel, 23 May, 2011.
This gets around the spirit but not the letter of the Kyoto Protocol, since some these other countries, notably China, aren’t required to limit their carbon emissions! He writes:
It could have been worse. After the Treasury and the business department tried to scupper the UK’s long-term carbon targets, David Cameron stepped in to rescue them. The government has now promised to cut greenhouse gases by 50% by 2027, which means that, with a following wind, the UK could meet its legally-binding target of 80% by 2050. For this we should be grateful. But the coalition has resolved the tension between green and growth in a less than convincing fashion: by dumping responsibility for the environmental impacts on someone else.
The carbon cut we have made so far, and the carbon cut we are likely to make by 2027, have been achieved by means of a simple device: allowing other countries, principally China, to run polluting industries on our behalf.
Officially, the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen from 788 million tonnes in 1990 to 566mt in 2009. Unofficially, another 253 megatonnes should be added to our account. 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.
This would be less of an issue if China were obliged to restrict its emissions. But under the only global treaty in force at the moment—the Kyoto Protocol—developing countries have no need to reduce their impacts. That suits the governments of both rich and poorer nations. Governments like ours can pretend that there is no conflict between green and growth. They avoid unpopular decisions, allowing people to consume whatever they fancy, and they keep business sweet by promising endless expansion. Governments like China’s can keep supplying us with the goods we couldn’t produce at home without breaking our obligations.
The “unofficial” calculation of 253 extra megatonnes of CO2 comes from here:
• Steven J. Davis and Ken Caldeira, Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 March 2011.
This paper claims that in wealthy countries such as Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, the United Kingdom, and France, more than 30% of consumption-related CO2 emissions were “imported”. In other words, a lot of their CO2 emissions weren’t actually done in those country: they happened during the production and shipping of goods that got imported to those countries!
You can see a bit of what’s going on from this picture (click to enlarge):
But be careful! For example: see the big fat arrow pointing from China to the US, with the number ‘395’ next to it? As far as I can tell, they got that number by working out how many megatonnes of CO2 were created by manufacturing goods in China and shipping them to the US during the year 2004… but then subtracting the megatonnes of CO2 created by manufacturing goods in the US and shipping them to China during that year.
So if I understand this correctly, there’s a lot of ‘cancellation’ going on in this picture. And that could fool the casual reader. After all, it’s not like CO2 produced in the US while making goods for export to China really helps cancel out the CO2 produced in China while making goods for export to the US! So, I’d prefer to see a picture that had labelled arrows pointing both ways between China and the US, and similarly for other countries or groups of countries.
(By the way, the EU is counted as one lump for the purposes of this picture.)
But that’s a small nitpick: this article is full of interesting things. For example, the authors say that the surge of carbon emissions since 2000 has been driven
not only by growth of the global population and per-capita GDP, but also by unanticipated global increases in the energy intensity of GDP (energy per unit GDP) and the carbon intensity of energy (emissions per unit energy).
And, they say that in 2004, 23% of world-wide CO2 emissions, or 6.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, were associated to international trade, primarily exports from China and other developing countries to rich countries.
(As you can see, the numbers labelling those arrows in the picture above don’t add up to anything like 6,200. That’s what made me suspect that there’s a lot of ‘cancellation’ going on in that picture.)
There is an arrow from US to China (26) and EU to China (16) in the picture though which indicates there is no cancellation.
Good point. I probably shouldn’t have been blogging when I was incredibly tired and stuck in an airport in Japan for 5 hours, but it was either that or go insane from boredom. (I was coming back from doing thesis defenses for three grad students of mine at UC Riverside who just finished up. I tried to do them via Skype to reduce carbon emissions, but there’s an outdated UC rule saying the thesis committee needs to be physically present.)
I’m still confused, though. The authors write:
which suggests taking a difference. Then they write, about the figure I showed:
I imagine I could decipher this with an hour of careful thought when I’m no longer jet-lagged, but at least in my current state I don’t find it strikingly clear. Can anyone help?
What do the arrows in the chart really mean, and how come they add up to so much less than 6,200?
I thought the arrows indicated “EET”, which is computed as a difference. But then why are there arrows pointing both ways between China and the US, for example?
As I understand it the arrows don’t add up to 6200 cause they only represent “outsourced” emissions, in other words emissions where the country producing the goods and country consuming them were different. In other words there are no arrows which originate and end in the same country in the picture.
That doesn’t make sense to me, because the authors say that in 2004, 23% of world-wide CO2 emissions, or 6.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, were associated to “international trade, primarily exports from China and other developing countries to rich countries”. Total CO2 emissions were about 4 times more than that.
John:
I take it to mean that 6200 was total anthropogenic CO2 emissions, if you then take 23% of that, you arrive at 1426 and if you look at the map the arrows seem to add up to roughly that amount.
I don’t know what the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions were in 2004 but the Wikipedia graph seems to point to something around 7.5 gigatonnes, which is much closer to 6.2 than to the 25 gigatonnes you imply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg
Arrow wrote:
That graph shows gigatonnes of carbon, not carbon dioxide. Each tonne of carbon burns to yield 3.667 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The Energy Information Administration says that in 2004, 27.4 gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted from burning fossil fuels. That’s corresponds to 7.47 gigatonnes of carbon. So, it agrees with the Wikipedia graph.
When Davis and Caldeira wrote:
I assumed they meant that if we take the 2004 global carbon dioxide emissions, and multiply them by 0.23, we’ll get 6.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Let me check that now!
27.4 × 0.23 = 6.3
Well, that’s pretty close. So, I still believe they’re claiming that 6.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide were “traded internationally”. And the arrows on that graph don’t add up to anything like that. That graph claims to be about carbon dioxide, not carbon. So I’m still puzzled.
Thanks for trying to help me figure this out.
You are right, the graph is about carbon, so my theory is wrong.
The only other option I can come up with is that they made the same mistake and mislabeled the graph when in reality it shows carbon not carbon dioxide. The arrows sum to 1626 while 23% of 2004 global carbon emissions (7470) would be 1718, the difference could be due to other trade routes not included in the picture.
More stuff that is a bit confusing:
According to Wikipedia “Oil and gas dominate Russian exports”, the middle east primarily exports fuel, south africa does export a lot of stuff but coal is one of the big exports. So it seems like the figures mix exports of manufactured goods (that could at least be done more locally) and exports of extracted fossil fuels to places that can buy them.
In a footnote to their paper, Davis and Caldeira write:
I’m not sure this makes things less confusing, but it must help to know this is how they think about these things.
Hi professor. What do you think about the Three Gorges Dam? Many claim that the drought disaster happening recently is caused by the big dam.
Hi! I haven’t heard from you in a while; I hope you’re doing well. Your name as it appears here on the blog looks a bit intimidating to people like me who can’t read Chinese, so I’ll remind people that you are “Jing Xiaoyi”.
I’m not an expert on the Three Gorges Dam, though my wife was lucky enough to take a boat tour of the Yangtze River going through areas that are flooded by the dam now.
I hadn’t known that the dam was blamed for droughts, but that’s mentioned here:
• Mara Hvistendahl, China’s Three Gorges Dam: an environmental catastrophe?, Scientific American, 25 March 2008.
and more recently here:
• David Stanway and Ken Wills, Q+A — Is the Three Gorges Dam responsible for the Yangtze drought?, Reuters, 27 May 2011.
Since Reuters news articles tend to go away after a while, let me quote this one for you:
The following article is a bit more interesting, though the remark about Mao and Tao sounds like the sort of stuff people write who haven’t actually spent much time in China:
• Peter Bosshard, Mao, Tao and the Three Gorges Dam, Huffington Post, 26 May 2011.
By the way, I’ll be visiting Jilin University for a math workshop in August, and the organizers have planned a camping trip near Changbai Mountain. I’m really looking forward to it!
Hi John Baez.
Thank you for your comment. I indeed have been disappeared from this blog for a long time. I’ve been working on my English(IELTS) test and application last year. And your blog had been blocked for a while in China. So far, it is still not stable to connect to your blog. I use illegal software to connect the facebook, youtube, wikipedia and your blog.
But recently I feel very sad. I suddenly come to an idea that many people in other countries don’t like chinese. I’ve been asked by some people from other countries again and again what sort of animals I eat, cat, dog?
I just don’t know how to answer them because I have no idea of eating cats or dogs and I clearly remember the first time when I heard a phd student from germany saying that chinese eat everything during a summer school.
In general, I feel extremely sad. I suffer from those questions. Their words often haunt me.
I used to be a guy who has strong awareness of protecting animals and environment. But recently, I find that I am not welcomed at all. They will be surprised that a chinese show his mercy to animals.
Hopefully, you make progress in your field.
Best,
Jingxiaoyi wrote:
Good luck! I think I can tell that your writing skills have improved. You’re way ahead of me. My wife speaks Chinese, since her specialty is comparing classical Chinese and Greek culture, but all I can say in Chinese is “two bottles of beer” and “thank you”.
That’s too bad! Thanks for telling me. I would hope the information on this blog is useful in China, just as anywhere else.
I urge you not to worry about this too much. Many people around the world don’t like Americans, but many people do. It’s the same with Chinese. It’s a stupid generalization to think that all Americans act some way, or all Chinese. Often these generalizations come from lack of direct experience: having lived in both places, I know that both countries are full of wonderful kind people, and also full of mean nasty people. Most people can be either kind or nasty, depending on the situation. I know I can.
Nationalistic generalizations can be dangerous, because they make it harder for people to live together in peace. In particular, if China and America don’t continue to find ways to live together peacefully, the whole world will suffer a lot. The only thing people like you and me can do about this is to be friendly to people from other countries even when they criticize ours.
Well, I’ve lived in Shanghai, and I’ve been to a restaurant there that had dog meat on the menu. I asked about it, and they told me that dog was not in season. I was very surprised to hear that there was a season for dogs! But it turns out some people think dog meat is yang, so they eat it during the winter.
You can read more about this on that famous online encylopedia, in the article on ‘dog meat’. If you do, you’ll see lots of Chinese organizations have organized to protest the eating of dog meat.
In France they have butchers that sell horse meat. I took a photograph of one in the Latin Quarter of Paris:
Americans tend to find this shocking, because they don’t eat horse meat.
Does any of this make me dislike Chinese people, or French people? No—that would be silly. I could easily list many things people do that are much worse than eating these particular animals. And besides that, probably most Chinese or French don’t actually eat these animals!
(Quick comment before I vanish.)
There’s often two things, the people of a country and the “national governing and corporate machinery” (which is often run by a relatively small number of people) which are often only very loosely connected. It’s quite common to have problems with the “national governing and corporate machinery” and its actions without having problems with most of the people. I have concerns about China and about the USA government/corporations, but then I also have problems with the British government/corporations (I’m British), but I don’t have problems with the majority of the populations.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that real policy issues seem to transform into mischaracterisations of the population of a country so easily.
The data on how some countries buy energy services from other countries is rather powerful, but mostly not traceable to the individual businesses that do it. This is a global economy.
That’s part of the reason that an accounting method like my Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) is needed. For energy accounting it’s a quite effective method for correcting for outdourcing.
The strong evidence of different countries do large amounts of outsourcing is that for the world economy, GDP and energy use have long been very simply and directly correlated, but for national accounts they are not. World GDP for several decades has been growing steadily, with energy use growing at 60% of that rate, the difference being due to a similarly steady rate of improving efficiency in turning energy into wealth.
US GDP continued to grow as fast or faster than the world’s, but our energy use started to fall off in ~1960. I know this contradicts all popular belief, but that’s why you might not trust anything you hear on the news about how the world works… The strong implication is that the US has been ever increasingly outsourcing its energy use.
see figures 1, 2 & 5 at
http://www.synapse9.com/pub/EffMultiplies.htm
and http://www.synapse9.com/SEA
for the hard science that proves the premise with slides if you want to poke into environmental systems science a bit
The real question is where does the diverging tendency of the US economy’s increasing dependency on other countries do the productive work we consume come to an end, as all divergences necessarily do. That’s another discussion, but the evidence that other countries, like India and China, are now weaning themselves off from working for us more and more, to working for themselves for a change, seems to be getting stronger I think. It may have big consequences.