Climate change: someone else's mess

Just what they didn't want you to notice: a new report, out this week to co-incide with the Bali party, points out that contrary to Government figures, UK emissions have risen by up to 19%.

The report, by a team of economists led by Dieter Helm at Oxford University, examined the UK's emissions by consumption, not production, and also included emissions from international aviation and shipping. Their findings make a mockery of the Government's efforts to spin our CO2 impact; our official report to the UN, which ignored these sectors, reports a 15% decrease in emissions.

Traditionally developed countries have monitored their emissions based on production, which disadvantages countries with high levels of manufacturing (mostly devloping ones). Since the enactment of the Kyoto Protocol, the UK has been rapidly outsourcing its pollution, sending factories overseas to China and other countries throughout the Global South.

While this has kept our emissions off the books, it has done nothing to curb our consumption, which just keeps growing and growing. Our obsession with shiny new things has kept us buying crap; producing crap emits CO2, but as we're no longer doing the manufacturing, we get to blame China and India for the emissions.

The report says "the economy's demand for greenhouse gases may have been growing", and that the Government's focus on production-derived CO2 (and its leaving aviation and shipping out of the equation) "gives the impression that the UK is winning the fight against climate change and it leads people to think that the UK is reducing its dependence on greenhouse gas emissions". In reality, "the decline in greenhouse gas emissions from the UK economy may have been to a considerable degree an illusion".

However, this discovery should in no way disrupt the ongoing party in Bali. I'm sure a "roadmap" (copyright US Government) to a climate solution will be just fine. It's not like the clock is ticking or anything.

Image thieved from minimunsecurity.net. Go check it out.