Anybody who has watched the march of jobs overseas already knows this, but it is nice to see science has finally caught up with what we already knew years ago. Look for more of this if a Cap and Trade bill passes in the U.S.. Senator Kerry says it has a “short fuse”. I don’t think it means what he thinks it does. – Anthony
Carbon emissions ‘outsourced’ to developing countries
Palo Alto, CA— A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution finds that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside their borders. Some countries, such as Switzerland, “outsource” over half of their carbon dioxide emissions, primarily to developing countries. The study finds that, per person, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.
“Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume,” says co-author Ken Caldeira, a researcher in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.
Caldeira and lead author Steven Davis, also at Carnegie, used published trade data from 2004 to create a global model of the flow of products across 57 industry sectors and 113 countries or regions. By allocating carbon emissions to particular products and sources, the researchers were able to calculate the net emissions “imported” or “exported” by specific countries.
“Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China,” says Davis. “On the flip side, nearly a quarter of the emissions produced in China are ultimately exported.”
Over a third of the carbon dioxide emissions linked to good and services consumed in many European countries actually occurred elsewhere, the researchers found. In Switzerland and several other small countries, outsourced emissions exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted within national borders.
The United States is both a major importer and a major exporter of emissions embodied in trade. The net result is that the U.S. outsources about 11% of total consumption-based emissions, primarily to the developing world.
The researchers point out that regional climate policy needs to take into account emissions embodied in trade, not just domestic emissions.
“Our analysis of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption in each country just states the facts,” says Caldeira. “This could be taken into consideration when developing emissions targets for these countries, but that’s a decision for policy-makers. One implication of emissions outsourcing is that a lot of the consumer products that we think of as being relatively carbon-free may in fact be associated with significant carbon dioxide emissions.”
“Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system,” adds Davis. “Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions 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.”
The report is published online in the March 1, 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Convincing China to rein in their economic growth is a pretty big ‘ask’ and probably impossible.
China is delighted to be part of an organisation that is hell-bent on destroying Western economies but when it comes time for their turn we’ll be unsurprised to see their reluctance, as evidenced by their objection at Copenhagen to independent inspection of carbon credit sites.
In Norway’s plan to meet it’s aggressive co2 emission cut goals, more use of first generation imported biofuels is an important element. The plan explicitly states that co2 emissions due to production will be charged to the production country’s co2 account. So the plan is to export both emissions and possibly famine to the third world – from a country rich on fossil fuel. It’s a crazy and cruel world 🙁
This counting of where exactly CO2 is produced looks to me like a bizarre ritual of the AGW religion, of course. The AGW juggernaut will next talk about introducing import tariffs. As usual, the law of unintended consequences will strike again and they’ll unintentionally wreck some economies even more. It will be rather painful to watch.
New Zealand is one of the few countries outside of Europe that has an emissions trading scheme. Yet we mine coal and export most of it.
The biggest markets are Japan at 41% and India at 23%
To my knowledge, neither of these countries has an emissions trading scheme
http://www.coalnz.com/index.cfm/1,144,0,0,html/International-Markets
Coal NZ spent a lot of money relocating a rare species of snail that was threatened by a coal operation
http://www.coalnz.com/index.cfm/1,250,0,49,html/Snail-the-Movie
While I don’t have a problem with this per se, this contradiction of our domestic policies and our willingness to export fossil fuels has always puzzled me.
This has been pretty obvious for a while. I think the statistics is something like a quarter of US manufacturing went abroad at a time when there was an “unexplained” drop in energy usage by about 25% over what you would have expected.
And some politicians had the gall to suggest they were responsible for keeping carbon emissions (balony) under control! … Which I suppose was true in a way given their attitude to UK engineering and manufacturing!
Nice to see that India is carbon neutral.
Pachauri must be proud!
” “Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system,” adds Davis.” LOL – How true 😀
“Levin said he would also seek another postponement … if a border adjustment plan had not been fully implemented that would add tariffs for carbon-intensive goods imported from developing countries without adequate climate policies of their own.”
Looks like they are indeed thinking about CO2 export taxes. Maybe I should become a carbon smuggler.
Not only manufacturing jobs to China, but service jobs to India. I have been a mainframe apps programer for 30 years and noticed this pattern accelerate since the millenium. It is a given that most mainframe projects are outsourced to India, but not so many people realise that there are a lot of PC or client based projects going out there as well.
What really surprised me though, was when a colleague told me that now real estate conveyancing is being outsourced to India (for non Brits, that comprises the land and deed searches an attorney’s firm performs for home buyers). So you have a PC in India doing UK land bureau searches via the internet and emailing the report back to the attorney’s office in the UK.
When manufacturing jobs were offshored, they told us we were now a service economy. When service jobs are offshored what kind of economy does that make us then?
“Andy Scrase (00:39:58) :
New Zealand is one of the few countries outside of Europe that has an emissions trading scheme. Yet we mine coal and export most of it.”
And in Australia, we do export massive volumes of coal too (And LNG at stupid prices to China, I think about AU$4 a tonne!!!!). What the ETS means is that “developing” countries will be paid to emit CO2 by “developed” countries via their ETS systems.
Wealth redistribution (After being “filtered” by Govn’ts, crooks and Al Gore types. Oh did I use Govn’ts, Al Gore and crooks in the same sentence? Bugger!).
“Vincent (01:14:17) : ”
I hear ya. Outsourcing happened in Australia before Y2K, circa 1998, with a marjor bank, branches closed etc. Of cource it looked great for the bottom line, but customers gave them the finger and moved. Bank helpdesks not based in Australia didn’t bode well with the Australian public and still don’t.
“China is by far the largest “exporter” of carbon dioxide emissions”
The logic is unclear here (and true, the arrows on the Carnegie picture don’t clarify). The text says:
Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.
Andy Scrase (00:39:58) says
‘New Zealand is one of the few countries outside of Europe that has an emissions trading scheme. Yet we mine coal and export most of it.
While I don’t have a problem with this per se, this contradiction of our domestic policies and our willingness to export fossil fuels has always puzzled me.’
Well that is an understatement. It is hypocritical and demonstrates a cynical contempt of the intelligence of New Zealanders for not being able to see through it. Either that or they don’t really subscribe to CAGW and are only interested in the potential tax take. As for the MSM here, it’s a non event – they are more interested in lagging behind Australia’s economy or the cricket.
Doug.
The following particularly interesting peer reviewed paper appeared recently. It deals with the climate model of Roe & Baker and shows up some of its serious shortcomings. I’m not a climate specialist; I’m only a humble nuclear physicist. However, if the Roe & Baker model underpins important aspects of the AR4 then it may well be worth your taking a look. If Zallapin is right then the climate model in question represents yet another serious ‘mistake’.
Roe, G. H. and Baker, M. B.: Why is climate sensitivity so unpredictable?
Science, 318, Issue: 5850, 629–632, 2007.
Another Look at Climate Sensitivity
Manuscript prepared for Nonlin. Processes Geophys.
with version 1.3 of the LATEX class copernicus.cls.
Date: 1 March 2010
arXiv:1003.0253v1 [physics.ao-ph] 1 Mar 2010
Ilya Zaliapin1 and Michael Ghil2
1Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Nevada, Reno, USA. E-mail: zal@unr.edu.
2Geosciences Department and Laboratoire de M´et´eorologie Dynamique (CNRS and IPSL), Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Paris,
FRANCE, and Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences and Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics, University
of California, Los Angeles, USA. E-mail: ghil@atmos.ucla.edu.
Abstract. We revisit a recent claim that the Earth’s climate
system is characterized by sensitive dependence to parameters;
in particular, that the system exhibits an asymmetric,
large-amplitude response to normally distributed feedback
forcing. Such a response would imply irreducible uncertainty
in climate change predictions and thus have notable
implications for climate science and climate-related policy
making. We show that equilibrium climate sensitivity in
all generality does not support such an intrinsic indeterminacy;
the latter appears only in essentially linear systems.
The main flaw in the analysis that led to this claim is inappropriate
linearization of an intrinsically nonlinear model;
there is no room for physical interpretations or policy conclusions
based on this mathematical error. Sensitive dependence
nonetheless does exist in the climate system, as well
as in climate models— albeit in a very different sense from
the one claimed in the linear work under scrutiny— and we
illustrate it using a classical energy balance model (EBM)
with nonlinear feedbacks. EBMs exhibit two saddle-node bifurcations,
more recently called “tipping points,” which give
rise to three distinct steady-state climates, two of which are
stable. Such bistable behavior is, furthermore, supported by
results from more realistic, nonequilibrium climate models.
In a truly nonlinear setting, indeterminacy in the size of the
response is observed only in the vicinity of tipping points.
We show, in fact, that small disturbances cannot result in
a large-amplitude response, unless the system is at or near
such a point. We discuss briefly how the distance to the bifurcation
may be related to the strength of Earth’s ice-albedo feedback.
Correspondence to: Ilya Zaliapin (zal@unr.edu)
The truth for New Zealand’s economy, if we were to properly address co2 emissions, is that we should close down our pastoral industries and our tourist industries because they are the greatest source of GHG emissions in NZ. This would just about close the county down – so we would be reduced to subsistence standard of living.
Doug
Nothing surprises me in this post.
OT, I have just received this morning an outcome from my UK Government complaint on its “Act on CO2” ad campaign screened on UK tv & in cinemas, etc.
As I said in a previous post, the “outcome” was completely & utterly predictable & no breeches of standards were made by the advertisers or Government. All the usual suspects were quoted by the Department for Energy and Climate Change, the UN, the IPCC, WMO, UNEPP, local energy suppliers. In summary, wash, white, carpet, under, & sweep, spring to mind. Intersting phrasiology in one para & I quote …..”They said the IPCC report considered that, based on current trends, summer heat events such as 2003 (which led to 2,000 additional deaths in the UK and more than 35,000 across Europe) were expected to be considered normal by the 2040s and cool by the 2060s.” Presumably it’s going to be “cool” for thousands to die in heat related events or something I suppose?
Full disclosure will be placed on the Advertising Standards Authority site on 17th March 2010.
Re: Vincent (Mar 11 01:14),
I think the technical term is Richard Cranium economy RCE
‘Looks like they are indeed thinking about CO2 export taxes. Maybe I should become a carbon smuggler.’
I don’t know how much tax you can avoid by holding your breath as you cross the border.
On the radio and TV news today (ABC network are notorious AGW believers) –
news item – high ranking Chinese politician claims that AGW is real – only fringe sceptics would deny it – you can see it happening every day – floods in the south – drought in the north, huricanes – the lot.
BUT China will do nothing to stop it happening. The west have been pumping CO2 in the air for 200 years -it’s our responsibility to fix it alone. Strange – until he said that, I thought he was serious, if deluded – but now I realise he is just being a politican.
On a seperate but related note – the chairman of the ABC network, in a local newspaper, has just decried the fact that his network is so biased on AGW reporting. The ABC is government owned and the Board must adopt a hands off role as far as programming is concerned.
The ABC management are beginning to take Tony Abbott seriously (he’s the new conservative party leader and is giving the government much trouble at the moment – not too hard to find things to criticise them for either). But the AGW seems to be a step too far – the ABC would never criticse that or even give skeptics a fair hearing, not until we all freeze over.
All good fun.
Who needs Kerry?
Watch what the new green giant smiley face does about it.
Wal-Mart is making its suppliers do “the dirty work” of reducing the carbon footprint of the company’s supply chain.
Does anyone else sometimes hear Richard Nixon laughing, besides me?
This all presumes that CO2 has a lot to do with global warming. As we know, it is at best a secondary forcing function at current levels. But it does demonstrate the damage that the gorebats could do to the US economy.
It gets more Byzantine by the minute.
Vincent: “When manufacturing jobs were offshored, they told us we were now a service economy. When service jobs are offshored what kind of economy does that make us then?”
A basketcase?
The lie we in the UK have been told for decades by our politicians (and that engineer hater supreme: the BBC) is that it was inevitable that manufacturing would disappear because they weren’t part of the future … that was “high tech”.
But then along came wind which couldn’t be dismissed as the “past” and was clearly going to grow (not so clear now! He He!) It was supposed to be the future, but when I got involved early on I quickly realised (correctly) that there was not a hope in hell of the UK ever having a wind industry because of the way the money was being syphoned off into useless research and being targeted (by lobbyist-led politicians) to market sectors where the UK hadn’t a hope of ever being competitive.
And remember that here in Scotland we live in the windiest and “waviest” place in Europe, with a history of engineers like Watt, we even had precisely the kind of heavy-manufacturing base in shipbuilding that was needed for wind, we even had the UK’s only >1kW successful wind-turbine manufacturer.
Scotland had everything going for it, and it should have been literally like organising an orgy in a brothel – except the overwhelmingly pathetic political system, and the stifling anti-engineering/manufacturing bias in the UK over-rode every positive advantages!
The egg is well and truly scrambled. I am beginning to wonder how the juggernaut can ever be stopped. I feel confident that the hypothesis of AGW is debunked but the trade in carbon is becoming the reality. The answer is to provide Mr and Mrs Joe Public, not with the science, with the cost they will have to bear because their government sold them a lie. Higher fuel bills, reduced standard of living and fewer jobs.
It has been oft repeated that it’s all about politics so the fight will have to be won in the legislatures of the US, UK, EU and smaller fish like Australia.
OT but interesting.
Just when you thought you were all ‘Gated’ out, we now have ASA-Gate
The final adjudication on the 939 complaints against the UK Government Propaganda campaign ‘Act on CO2’ has just been issued by the Advertising Standards Agency.
It finds that ‘ The TV ad did not breach the Code in any respect’.
It relies heavily on the discredited IPCC reports for it’s findings and the ad’s included such gems as 40% of co2 is produced by the way we heat and light our homes.
So just another whitewash from the Government. The Chairman of the ASA is Lord Smith of Finsbury, a well known alarmist who believes we should all have carbon passports.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/carbon/6527970/Everyone-in-Britain-could-be-given-a-personal-carbon-allowance.html
It is going to take a generation to remove all these zealots from important non Govermental positions.
The full report is to be published on the asa.org.uk website on the 17th March.