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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Douglas DC (06:58:30) :
We (USA,UK,Austrailia,and EU) do not win-and all this will unwind…
China just laughs at our foolishness….
I agree wholeheartedly with your entire post here. The whole ‘Angloshpere’ plus the EU are smitten with this insane mindset – i.e. the politicians, the MSM and the sheepies. The logical end to this madness is the destruction of ‘our’ economies. For what? An unproven idea that co2 emissions will cause CAGW. Cor blimey!
Doug
“Jaye (07:14:29) :
Biofuels, solar and wind are unsustainable sources of energy. They can only survive with government funding. Its ridiculous to even consider them as long term energy independence solutions.”
Jaye: The whole idea of Cap & Trade is to tax fossil burning power plants in order to make wind and solar and geothermal economically feasible. Current wind and solar power is heavily subsidized, but they exist because the most US States require a minimum fraction of the utility’s power to be “renewable”. This cleverly excludes nuclear, because “breeding” fuel does not meet the government definition of “renewable”. Obama’s next year budget includes $360 Billion tax income from carbon dioxide emitters, mostly power plants.
Also, the manufacture of hydrogen using current technology emits about 3 tons of CO2 for every ton of hydrogen produced. There’s no such thing as a hydrogen mine. Does anybody have more accurate numbers?
Mike Haseler (08:11:39) :
Or as confusion says: the way to destroy capitalism, is to set the market forces of capitalism to devour its capital … and to help it along make them feel guilty about the manufacturing output that is the bedrock of any real economy by convincing them an innocuous gas called CO2 is bad …..
Well this (your post) just about sums up the whole situation. Governments have forgotten who they represent. Since rampant globalisation has taken hold, business people need have no allegiance to any state – the world is their oyster. The collapse of the banking system since the last vestiges and fetters of the ‘Glass Steagall’ were removed demonstrates that mindset in both governance and business. National interest has to be acknowledged and enforced by governance.
Doug
‘“Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system,” adds Davis.’
And more to the point: CO2 emissions, period, do not matter much at all!
So the location discussion is only a distraction from this key point:
As Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, said, “One of the things the scientific community is pretty agreed on is those things [i.e. CO2 limits…we might ad, ‘period, regardless of location’] will have virtually no impact on climate no matter what the models say. So the question is do you spend trillions of dollars to have no impact? And that seems like a no brainer.”
Dan in California (11:22:46) :
“There’s no such thing as a hydrogen mine.”
Exactly! And there is no such thing as a methanol mine either.
So every time someone talks about hydrogen or methanol driven cars, ask them where the stuff comes from.
By the way, there is no such thing as “LiPo’s battery” mines either.
Ask; How much (of what) does it cost to produce it?
This piece from Carnegie Insitution is what is called a trial balloon.
We’re all familiar with the usual pathetic attempts by politicians in many countries to rein in CO₂ emissions through various programs — carbon trading, cap-and-trade, and on and on.
This suggests carrying carbon punishment a step farther. How to solve the problem of outsourced carbon production? Just tax it when it enters the country. Think Smoot-Hawley Tariff. What a wonderful idea! Now, instead of a single country engaged in self-immolation, we can all get onboard a world-wide carbon tax and in one swell foop destroy the entire world economy. Brilliant.
And then Paul “always wrong” Ehrlich’s prophesies will become true.
Factories in many industrialized nations closed as a result of increased global competition and the Kyoto Treaty. Factories in China (and elsewhere in Asia) took their place. Increased carbon emissions are a by-product of ramped-up production and the factories in China were usually less energy efficient and emitted more pollutants than the factories that were closed.
The jobs “went to China” as well.
I think my fellow kiwis have missed the local implications of the idea of exported carbon. Most of our carbon emissions come from pastural industries (belching cows). But most the product of these industries are exported. So under the logic of the article these are not OUR carbon emissions. We get to blame these carbon emissions on someone else.
Voila – New Zealand meets its ambitious carbon emissions target at the stroke of a pen!
Unfortunately the flip side of this logic is that the countries that import our goods may start to slap carbon taxes on it. In fact the French are probably reaching for their pens right now.
Bummer!
Silly me, but does it work in reverse also?
If they outlawed all fossil fueled production and transport today, the shortages, starvation and panic would begin in Europe, who are obviously living far beyond their means.
Something about a 100 mile theory?
Leon Brozyna wrote: “This piece from Carnegie Insitution is what is called a trial balloon…… Think Smoot-Hawley Tariff. …”
That’s what I was thinking but tariffs are a WTO issue. Circumvent WTO agreements with a carbon emissions tax. The ideal tax level is virtually equivalent to the delta between product production cost in a carbon importer country and a carbon exporter country.
” over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside their borders”
Yea, we just lower our emissions over 33%.
Can we have our coal back and drill now?
Vincent (01:14:17) :
“….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?”
It makes you a fourth world economy so strangled in regulations you can not make it up to third world status.
Before WTO one could consider a carbon import tax (no to concede the point that there is no need to reduce carbon emissions). But a national based carbon cap without such an import tax would just be an invitation of whats left of the manufacturing base in the US to flee.
It’s insanity, unless that is the purpose.
That may be. Don’t laugh, this is going to get heavy, but there were some who publicly expressed a desire to de-industrialize the US as early as the early 1970’s, and to industrialize Asia. It was called the trilateralization of the global economy, with the West becoming more of Info-tech service based economy to replace manufacturing.
In fact, AGW fits into this strategy as carbon cap and trade is simply the foundation for an additional economic, financial and monetary system, requiring it’s own specialized accountants, bankers, tax collectors, auditors, investment bankers, environmental police, etc . More jobs to create absolutely nothing, but that allows folks to continue to purchase goods made elsewhere.
Carbon credits, like most money credit today, is simply a fictitous currency existing as bits and bytes on a hard drive. For each credit, there must be a corresponding debt paying interest to balance the books. Credits are never created to pay the interest on the debt, so you have another mechanism for huge booms and busts in the economic cycle which benefit those at the top of the economic pyramid.
Back in the 60’s, given productivity gains in manufacturing, it was envisioned that the average worker would only need to work 2-3 days a week at full employment, since we could produce more than we and the world could consume. This was unacceptable, imagine the herd having so much free time, not to mention reduced profits by holding back on production, so some intellectuals embarked on the current strategy of producing goods in low wage countries while providing easy credit and jobs that produce nothing to pay for them, and this has been ongoing for 40 years now. But it is not sustainable, so we need carbon cap and trade to supplement the current model.
Heh I should have finished my PhD on this issue a decade or two ago … might have been highly referenced by now. I was looking at the embodied energy trade in Australia, which is, of course, a massive net energy exporter in both direct and indirect (embodied) forms.
I would echo what has been said… any policy on CO2 that is not global is meaningless. It would simply lead to carbon leakage to countries without CO2 legislation … common sense really. Countries like Australia have the most to lose from enacting cap-n-trade.
I even had a sexy title (by PhD standards) “Australia’s Invisible Energy Trade.” Hot stuff… but the intarwebs came along and I got a tad distracted >.>
I should have a look at this paper and see to what level they disaggregated the trade data. If the analysis is at a high level it can lead to erroneous results. For instance, if one uses an energy intensity approach and looks at Australian trade at the 2-digit SITC level for Australia, the manufatured goods trade would seem to indicate that Australia is a net importer of enbodied energy (and hence CO2). Disagggregate the data to the 3-digit SITC level and the truth becomes apparent that Australia is a massive energy exporter. The devil is in the detail. If they used a detailed input-output analysis approach they should have decent results.
I voted for a short fuse, before I voted against it.
Dave E (05:26:34) :
@ur momisugly Joe
@ur momisugly Mike Haseler
Speaking of wind turbine efficiency ..
Heres an interesting read
http://nov55.com/wdm.html
Thanks.
I have not seen this before and it is from a NASA scientist.
He’s going by weight to efficiency and number of blades possible.
I was going by splitting energy and and twisting it slightly to angles of deflection to harness the maximum energy to work together to create the greatest amount of torque.
This makes “For every action, there is an equal opposite reaction” work at 78% efficiency at actual energy being taken out of a flow stream.
Called “Inverting a Turbine”
I trust that when the alarmists calculate the ‘carbon debt’ the West owes the developing world they intend to fully discount it by the number of jobs they (politicians) have exported also.
In Australia the manufacturing sector has been virtually destroyed. I’d say any ‘carbon debt’ has already been fully paid for by the relative poverty that has been inflicted on the many Australian workers who have lost secure manufacturing jobs over the last few decades to countries such as China and Indonesia. And I’d say that even if I believed in the AGW myth.
Climate change challenges dwarf funding promises – economist
The annual $100 billion rich countries have agreed to mobilise by 2020 to help developing nations address climate change is “a very modest sum”, according to a top academic who is a member of a high-level panel that will work out how to raise the money.
The pledge “is a small sum in relation to the type of challenges we are talking about,” Nicholas Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told a conference of development experts in London this week.
http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/20316/2010/02/12-163026-1.htm
“Leon Brozyna (13:55:05) :
[…]
And then Paul “always wrong” Ehrlich’s prophesies will become true”
I am slightly amused by all the dystopian economic visions here. But your line demonstrates clearly that they will in the end not come true.
The reason?
Paul Ehrlich would be right, then. And that would violate every fundamental law of the universe. 😉
Oh BTW, all you economy-dystopians beware you don’t fall into the same trap the environmentalists and AGW scientists are in. People fall in love with their favorite dystopian vision… you should all read Julian Simon and Björn Lomborg.
brent (10:09:50) :
“Climate change challenges dwarf funding promises – economist
The annual $100 billion rich countries have agreed to mobilise by 2020 to help developing nations address climate change is “a very modest sum”….”
It is not a modest sum when one’s president signed a treaty to export all your countries business and jobs overseas – Clinton and WTO in 1995- and then further wrecked the economy beyond repair on November 2 ,1999 with the repeal of Glass-Stegall which tore down the wall between investment banks and S&Ls.
Statistics showed in 1990, before WTO was ratified and the repeal of Glass-Stegall , Foreign ownership of U.S. assets amounted to 33% of U.S. GDP. By 2002 this had increased to over 70% of U.S. GDP. http://www.fame.org/HTM/greg%20Pickup%201%2010%2003%20report.htm
“…Of mergers and acquisitions each costing $1 million or more, there were just 10 in 1970; in 1980, there were 94; in 1986, there were 346. The 1980’s also saw a wave of giant leveraged buyouts. Mergers, acquisitions and L.B.O.’s, which had accounted for less than 5 percent of the profits of Wall Street brokerage houses in 1978, ballooned into an estimated 50 percent of profits by 1988… THROUGH ALL THIS, THE HISTORIC RELATIONSHIP between product and paper has been turned upside down…. THERE ARE SIGNS THAT A VICIOUS spiral has begun…” January 29, 1989 http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/magazine/leveraged-buyouts-american-pays-the-price.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all New York Times
Stewart Dougherty, a specialist in inferential analysis, agrees. It is now “statistically impossible for the United States to pay its obligations”. http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/08.09/metastasis.html
Essentially the USA is bankrupt.
The annual Gross Domestic Product, the amount assigned to the value of all the goods and services sold, is about $14 trillion dollars. Congress has just voted to raise the “debt ceiling” to about $14 trillion dollars. We no longer have the jobs or the industry to produce the taxes to come up with that modest $100 billion. The bankers are taking all our tax money instead. Grace Commission report notes that 100% of personal income tax goes to pay interest on the national debt, the lion’s share of which goes to the banking cartel that we know as the Federal Reserve. http://www.bloggernews.net/17032
It would be very amusing to see a similar chart showing the SOURCE of the carbon so emitted… So just follow it on back to the OPEC oil and the coal mines of the world…
Believe it or not, China has signed up for 20 year range coal contracts from the USA to help meet their demand. So we ship them coal and dollars, then they send us Happy Meal toys… What a deal… And we’re not the only ones. They buy, literally boatloads of coal from Australia and around the world.
So if we ship all the coal and money to China this helps reduce CO2 how? And it helps build a stable economy and political structure in countries other than China how? And it mitigates environmental damage how? And it …
Sometimes you just want to cry…
Yep Australia exported over 47 million tonnes of coal to China last year worth over A$5.5 billion (approximately US$5 billiion). As E.M.Smith pointed out, we have been signing massive coal export contracts with China in the last year. This demand ain’t going away any time soon.