Britain’s CO2 Emissions Have Fallen to Levels Last Seen in 1890 (2018)
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
The economist podcast [1] touched on this topic recently during an interview with Prof Dieter Helm [2] who has a series of lectures & a new book about this.
[1] For the podcast, check out the last 9 minutes of https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/09/08/tech-wreck-the...
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom?countr...
And to make things even worse, emissions from aviation and shipping are not attributed to any specific country. Talk about creative accounting.
For instance, it can be that the UK buying produce from warmer countries is lower emissions in total, because to grow much of it in the UK would require heated+lit greenhouses.
"Our results show that imported tomatoes from Spain and Italy have two times lower greenhouse gas emissions than those produced in Austria in capital-intensive heated systems. On the contrary, tomatoes from Spain and Italy were found to have 3.7 to 4.7 times higher greenhouse gas emissions in comparison to less-intensive organic production systems in Austria. Therefore, greenhouse gas emissions from tomato production highly depend on the production system such as the prevalence or absence of heating." [1]
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-013-0171-8
It's the second part that it's important here. It doesn't really matter where tomatoes are grown: Italy, Spain or Austria. In absolute terms, tomatoes production still results in far more carbon emissions then less-intensive produce.
Moreover, you have to compound those emission numbers with consumption numbers. Tomatoes are a basically a staple food in the Western world. Massive amounts are produced and consumed. This is why the consumer price per unit is basically pennies at the counter.
The offset of that is, in absolute terms, a massive carbon footprint. If hundreds of thousands of tons of tomatoes are shipped by airplane or freightship across the world anually, that still translates into big emissions.
In order to reduce carbon emissions in a meaningful way, the entire life cycle of the product in your shopping bag should be weaned off fossil fuel use in an absolute terms. This isn't an easy exercise:
"The results show that the largest reduction of environmental impacts can be achieved by consuming seasonal fruits and vegetables, followed by reduction of transport by airplane. Sourcing fruits and vegetables locally is only a good strategy to reduce the carbon footprint if no greenhouse heating with fossil fuels is involved. The impact of water consumption depends on the location of agricultural production. For some crops a trade-off between the carbon footprint and the induced water stress is observed." [2]
That's not what your quoted article says though? Not that I doubt it but the quote talks about different methods for producing tomatoes, not how different produces have different grenhouse emissions during production.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/29/national...
UKEF has ploughed more than £6 billion into fossil fuel companies in the last 10 years, which will produce 69 million tons of CO2 per year, or 1/6th of the UK's current output.[1]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51216084
[1] https://environmentjournal.online/articles/uk-government-has...
Why not divide the emissions from air and shipping routes between the origin and destination countries?
Slightly more complex for shipping, perhaps, where ships may stop and load/unload cargo at multiple points along a route.
And it would be unfair to penalise countries with large ports when much of the cargo they handle is being shipped onward to other destinations.
But I’m sure these issues could be figured out.
This takes us back to the point of the top-level comment, but I think it's also unfair to penalize countries with large factories, when much of the manufacturing output is being shipped to other destinations.
Carbon should be attributed back to the consumers that paid for it to be emitted, not the place where it was emitted. This is what a carbon tax would achieve, as companies would pass the tax on to consumers, who ultimately drive all this manufacturing activity.
The Brits don't get a free pass just because they paid people in poorer countries to emit carbon for them.
If emissions are attributed the country where they are physically made, then it incentivizes rich countries to offshore all their manufacturing to poor countries - which is exactly what's happened here in the case of Britain.
If the choice is between poverty and low emissions, of course developing nations are going to have lax regulations.
I'm glad someone else recognizes it.
I'm not a massive proponent of 'local manufacturing' because there are efficiencies to be had letting others build their skills in something that you might not want to focus on. Regardless, I do think that the public's debate about this should be framed with your post (perfunctory), so that we can wrestle with all the unintended consequences and we can make those important decisions as an informed public.
P.S. This goes for any country. Not just Britain, hence I didn't mention Britain in my post. Ultimately, I'm just glad others see the shady 'facts' that deceive the public.
Provided it’s being moved to source of the raw materials. Which, I imagine, is often not the case.
The stupidity is astounding.
At this stage I'm amazed that anyone still believes that national control means universally better outcomes, considering the historical record of such government led activity.
What we have here is Goodhart's law in full effect, and it'll happen irrespective of who leds it.
Waaaaaaaay longer than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade#/media/File:Droits_...
This is all enabled by free trade and globalization. This is where all those good manufacturing jobs in Detroit/Pittsburgh went.
And then when we look at some demographic information the "why" becomes a lot more clear:
- https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/detroitcitymich...
- https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/philadelphiacountypennsylv...
What next, point fingers at where when African nations want to build their electrical networks, roads where to burn oil with automobiles? It's a difficult situation to solve, "just install solar" won't cut it.
Let's not pat ourselves on the back and pretend the problem is solved.
1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
If consumption emissions really decreased 11% from 1990 -> 2014, that's quite an achievement. Even though we need 10x that.
So I don't want to disagree with you per se, I think it's important to recognize that exporting industries is not, per se, solving climate change. But I thin it's also important to recognize that solving climate change, in the early stages, probably does look a lot like just reshuffling things by country.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
US up 6%, China down 10% for example.
But, yes, to accurately track responsibility this adjustment should be made or else unethical people will have an incentive to shift production to lax regimes.
One mildly surprising aspect is that countries that export fossil fuels show up here, even if you count the burning on the importer side. This is because the drilling and mining has carbon impacts on top of the burning.
E.g. all airplanes used in China were manufactured in Europe or the US, so you could say "China is outsourcing their industry to Europe and the US to keep their CO2 emissions low".
Territorial emissions accounting might not be perfect, Mabey says, but in terms of simplicity it is the more practical approach. Lord Deben, chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, told the BBC the UK only has direct control over its home-grown emissions, whereas manufacturing methods and energy choices in China are outside our control.
Barrett says consumption accounting brings additional information to the table, but agrees there’s no need to abandon territorial accounting methods. Instead, he says consumption emissions highlight how hard it is to decouple emissions from economic growth.
That’s why many commentators were so surprised that carbon emissions stalled in 2014, even as the global economy expanded. For a good chance of limiting warming to below two degrees, the challenge of decoupling emissions from growth will have to be cracked.
Countries control what they can measure, which is where we are currently. However, fixing climate change requires a completely coherent and coordinated global response, which will have hugely implications for economic growth. Essentially, our economic & political models won't allow us to apply the fix we really need.
Without that, we are left with countries trying to do the best they can individually.
[1] - https://www.carbonbrief.org/are-the-uks-emissions-really-fal...
It is not that products from China are shippped to UK without any countervalue in opposite direction. If UK lowers its per-dollar emissions and other countries not, then UK necessarily imports more 'dirtier' products, but exports 'cleaner'.
If you account it by production, then you see UK is cleaner and other countries not, if you account it by consumption, then you see all countries are a bit cleaner (based on how they consume UK goods). Accounting by production makes more sense as governments have much more control about production in their countries.
I mean if you do it one way, you have to do it the other way too.
If so the next step should be to analyze the CO2 footprint of the country and start taking steps in reducing that number instead. Eg. banning ICE vehicles would help big time I guess.
But in general I think you are overstating the impact of CO2 emissions policy on UK deindustrialization. That process began well before any CO2 policies were in place, with labor costs and scale being far larger factors.
So what if China produces goods in a dirty manner? How is this the UK's problem? This is a classic case of moving the goalposts. The UK has achieved carbon emission reductions without negatively impacting the standard of living, but of course that is not sufficient for the climate activists, is it, as it is the modern standard of living that they truly have an issue with.
Perhaps the climate activitists don't realize is that most of the population doesn't want to live "one with nature", and we are extremely loath to give up the creature comforts of modern urban living. Much of climate moralizing nowadays reminds me of the Temperance League at the turn of the century.
How did you turn a comment on method of accounting into a screed against "modern standard of living" and for living "one with nature"?
Is the UK supposed to turn away from global trade and become an isolated, self-sufficient nation just to meet its climate commitments? Do you require that of every nation on the planet?
Or should the UK impose its policies and laws on other nations? Do you prefer that model?
It then becomes the importing manufacturer’s responsibility to actually do something about climate change.
I don't think it's a particularly good argument that we should accept one method of accounting or another because we like or dislike its policy implications. What is an honest and clear method of accounting in your eyes?
Territorial emissions accounting might not be perfect, Mabey says, but in terms of simplicity it is the more practical approach. Lord Deben, chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, told the BBC the UK only has direct control over its home-grown emissions, whereas manufacturing methods and energy choices in China are outside our control.
By consequent, I disagree with your more holistic approach of measuring carbon costs as it is based on a moral judgement, and not a quantity that we can measure in any reasonable way.
To take moral responsibility for the effects of ones own consumption on the rest of the world seems just to me.
This is not to diminish the efforts the UK has undergone to transform their energy sector.
For example the UK last month produced 515,000 tons of steel. In the 1890s it produced 420,000 tons per month.
The title might as well be "UK De-Industrialization Complete".
[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmbi...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/steel-production
My quibble is that people are entirely writing this off because it's not enough, and I don't think that's helpful. We need to take some satisfaction when things are going in the right direction, even if it's not enough yet.
It's like a boss whose only method of motivating people is to constantly point out deficiencies in someone's work, rather than giving balanced feedback and praising them where it's due.
Nope. The whole point of electricity is that you don't need to care. When a gas plant comes on line - producing cheaper and cleaner power - it doesn't change anything about the actual electricity used in industry or how they use it.
If Britain needed 50GW of baseline power for a North covered in manufacturing plants in 2020, it would buy more gas power plants and maybe wind farms - not coal because coal is too expensive.
If the UK was still producing steel at the level it was in 1960 it would require up to 10% of the total current electricity production to meed the demand of the sector [1] [2]. That's just one industry.
The UK's electricity demand has fallen over 20% since the peak in 2000 [3].
The other reason why coal is no longer a good deal for the UK is that Thatcher wanted to crush organized labour in the mines, managed to do it and then found that trying to import coal from Australia was a losing proposition.
Had British industry not been stabbed in the back by the Tories we'd be looking at new plants which would be a mix on coal and gas and maybe if the greens could have been kept at bay nuclear, but old plants will still be open because they could make money.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro1/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom
[3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-primary-energy-use-i...
> "Domestic metal extraction is currently restrict-ed to three locations: a small gold mine near Omagh in Northern Ireland; the Cavendish Mill in the Southern Pennine Orefield (SPO) in Derbyshire where about 1200 tonnes of smelter-grade lead sulfide is extracted per annum as a by-product of fluorspar mining; and a major new tungsten mine at Hemerdon near Plymouth where the first deliveries of tungsten concentrate took place in the third quarter of 2015. This mine will be one of the largest pro-ducers of tungsten in the West when it reaches full production."
(BGS mineral planning factsheet 2015)
The tungsten mine is a classic mining story, it seems to have gone in and out of business depending on market fluctuations: https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/new-owne...
It's also really sparse: "Exploration by Amax in the early 1980s identified a resource of 42 million tonnes at 0.18% WO3 (tungsten trioxide) and 0.025% Sn (tin)." (BGS)
While we lament how much of this is due to offshoring industries to China, it's also a good sign that carbon-importing countries seem to have been trending down over the past 10 years while carbon-exporting country (China) is leveling off in its emission. My naive read would be that we learned to make more efficient use of carbon while off-shoring is happening.
All countries need to do much more but SOME really need to wake up and do their part!
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
So the price of oil is the explanation (trillions of dollars), but everything about the tarsands is insane. The CO2 emissions are probably #3.
The man who invented the technology was horrified, then he died of cancer. Many dangerous chemicals in the mix are being processed and stored beside major rivers in tailing 'ponds'.
The tailing ponds that are actually very large lakes of toxic sludge kill countless birds each year. They installed scarecrows probably 10 years ago.
The natural gas (methane) being burned to extract the tar from the sand with heat is the actual emission of CO2. They were thinking about building nuclear power plants to generate heat instead. This would solve the emissions issue that everyone complains about, but then there would be nuclear waste being generated to create bitumen. This seemed a little too crazy and didn't go anywhere.
Finally, this bitumen needs to be processed, but it doesn't move in a pipeline. So yet another petroleum product is shipped in from the middle east to dissolve it, so it will flow through pipelines to the US for refining and let's face facts here, consumption.
Construction of pipelines, and the ongoing risk of a spill are all added to the list.
But people need to commute to their office job and they can't afford to do that if the price of oil is too high, and it is a hedge against a major disruption in production in the middle east which is only a few Iranian nukes away from reality.
It's all insane, but the CO2 is just lower on the list.
Up to a point - but the UK for example deliberately destroyed its own coal industry partly due to concern over carbon, so I would say it's not completely reasonable to give countries a pass for merely responding to fossil fuel usage generally. Nations can and do take the better choice sometimes.
It's the contrast between the incessant virtue signalling from the Canadian government with the wanton destruction of the environment and harm inflicted on indigenous people that is really sickening.
The average American pollutes several transatlantic flights per year on commuting alone.
So if you start out using many times more energy than other countries per capita, you'll struggle to equal them on CO2 emissions even if that's a core policy goal.
The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage. I will walk to the nearby grocery store in a few minutes to buy my week's groceries, many Americans will drive, perhaps as much as an hour, to buy their groceries, it's not as though eating is optional. And this low density also forces bad energy source choices (e.g. using wood fires to keep warm seems pretty reasonable when there is no mains electricity out where you live even though of course it's very inefficient)
But to be fair consumerism does not help. Americans have been somewhat resistant to energy efficiency technologies that took off elsewhere, consumption is a sign of wealth and success and so efficiency is in that sense "bad". The entire city of Las Vegas is clearly a terrible idea from an energy efficiency point of view, why would you build a city in a desert?
I think it would be super interesting to look at CO2 emission per capita broken down by states (i.e. perhaps states along the coasts would show a very different picture than less populated states).
309 people per mi2 (France) vs 421 for the NY state.
its astonishing how the difference between "live in a city" and "live in the suburbs outside a city" is more than 3:1
Of course there's the open question of whether something like Brookline or even more so Cambridge or Somerville count as "suburbs outside a city".
80% of the US lives in "urban" areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...), and that's where most of the emissions are from. It's not geography that causes the low density, it's urban sprawl and culture. Eating might not be optional, but living in a car-centric low-density neighborhood definitely is. It's one of the things our ancestors would consider a luxury, and which our ever-comparing north american minds now treat as a basic necessity.
So an honest article would say britain's CO2 emissions has risen significantly since 1890. But it's probably just paid PR study with an agenda like almost all of climate related news is.
Another PR on the frontpage.
"Google says its carbon footprint is now zero"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468892
It's like how parts of europe "recycled" most of their plastic/trash... by shipping it to china.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-recycling-china-trash...
Just paid PR nonsense.
And I can't wait for PR about how great norway is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
The top 5 oil producer on a per capita basis.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom?countr...
(emissions were actually lower in 1928ish)
(emissions are still much too high and global emissions Co tinue to rise)
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/library/reports?section_id=7 A good source for atmospheric(air quality) data.
This is, after all, the goal we're trying to achieve - reduction in CO2 emissions - isn't it?. It's good news that at least one advanced economy has done this.
Can we just take a moment to celebrate some good news, please, folks?
A personal bugbear though, we should be working much harder to reduce or eliminate flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5...
A power/heating plant with proper monitoring of the combustion and filtering of the smoke is definitely no worse than a coal burning plant.
The main reason for refurbishing coal plants for other fuels or shutting them down entirely is that coal is terrible regarding CO2 footprint.
The wood used is not fed with industrial fertilizer, it doesn't require clearing the land to grow, and it doesn't require irrigation or ongoing maintenance. 100% of the carbon it contains was sucked out of the air not mined from the foundations of the Earth. It is completely carbon neutral.
I would go as far as saying wood heat is fantastic for human health.
I cannot find the source at the moment but at least in the UK they are basically importing wood chips from US, Canada, Malaysia, etc. just to keep the existing "bio mass" incinerators burning.
'James Woodley, an Environmental Biologist and resident of Northampton County, North Carolina, an area severely affected by wood pellet production for Drax’s biomass burning, said: ‘Now that the forests are gone, so is the sense of community. Dust is everywhere, even people are breathing in dust and becoming sick from it. When Enviva [a Drax pellet supplier] moved to our community, and to other poor communities in the Southeastern US, the company promised to bring hope to the hopeless, to reduce poverty, but what they ended up bringing was truckloads of logs, daily, constantly barrelling through.’'
Effectively none of these business are actually profitable and would be insolvent without government help/cronyism. This money is pretty much wasted on these polluting businesses and is money that could be applied elsewhere towards the environment.
How much of that is actually trees rather than capture of agricultural methane? [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#E... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas
Drax alone has a biomass capacity of 2.6GW, which is more than the 1.7GW currently coming from biomass (see https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/).
By that measure, burning biomass is CO2 neutral. The carbon released is not carbon which was extracted from the ground. It's carbon which was extracted from the air by plants.
All plant matter releases carbon dioxide as it breaks down anyway. Those trees which we burn as biomass weren't going to magically disappear - unless someone buried them they would eventually rot, releasing most of the carbon they extracted as they grew.
Combined it make for a rather risky strategy for stopping climate change.
However, I don't think dismissing biomass (or biofuels) completely is necessarily the right approach either. It's essentially a method of using natural processes to capture energy from the sun, and has the huge benefit of producing energy which can be stored indefinitely. Storing enough energy to get through renewable lulls without resorting to fossil fuels is an unsolved problem, and biofuels may be one of our best bets right now.
It would be interesting to see a full cycle efficiency analysis of biofuels - what percentage of the energy gained is used to grow and harvest plants, how much agricultural waste is currently burned/rotting without energy extraction.
Our strategy for stopping climate change right now seems to be "do almost nothing", which also seems rather risky to me. The quickest way to deal with it would be to use the market to drive innovation by applying a high tax on all extracted carbon. If renewable or carbon neutral energy was significantly cheaper than fossil fuels, the rewards for innovation would be much higher and so we'd see all sorts of interesting solutions. Right now green technology funding mostly exists in a subsidy driven top down command economy.
Unfortunately that requires political will, something that's almost entirely absent right now. People are all for green initiatives right until it actually effects how much they pay for fuel.
https://i1.wp.com/www.cabaltimes.com/wp-content/Manchester_I...
https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/reports/report-2020-q2/deta...
From being down by 21% in Q2.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/550592/uk-electricity-co...
Consumption in 1970: 192 TWh
Consumption in 2019: 295 TWh
More legit numbers would show the total amount of consumption and trace the emissions back to source, not just look at emissions at source in country.
Also these stats only look at emissions and overlook sequestration, which can be huge in some countries. For example, the UK has long since lost most of its forests which means it sequesters a lot less carbon than more forested countries like the United States.
The national based calculations hide the global chain of events and the interconnectedness of their economies through marketplaces.
It's a much harder calculation to figure out who's to "blame" for say, the cost of an electronics device that uses a dozen countries to manufacture or say even a food that is sourced in one country, processed in another, packaged in yet another, and then consumed in a fourth...
Do we assign everything to the point of consumption? That's not fair either. Distribute it over each?
That's what we currently do but it problematically hides the relationship. The British are still consuming textiles, they just aren't domestically manufacturing them. They may even still own the plants, they're just in, likely, Bangladesh which is seeing a ~5% annual CO2 increase.
That should matter if those things were made by the demand of British consumers but in our traditional models it doesn't go into Britain's bucket.
That makes it an accounting trick with no clear way to resolve it.
It would be like graphing the number of backyard burials for a culture that moved from the practice of backyard burials to cemeteries and mistaking it as if they somehow vanquished death and are now eternal except in a few very deadly places. We've moved towards globally centralized manufacturing.
There's lots of citations that can be made but the way things work are way different now then say in 1960.
This is mostly necessary in politically charged topics (energy generation (because that relates to climate change) and mentioning Russia specifically were both red flags to me) because spurious emotive bullshit and deliberate misinformation are very common.
This particular comment also didn't have enough information to be very useful - How much energy does the UK import from Russia? In what form? Has that amount changed recently? Why do you believe this is a bad thing? are all interesting questions the commenter could answer that would add to the conversation in a useful way.
I really wish I were intelligent enough to systematize it, but billions of dollars have so far failed to establish procedures for sound reasoning. Or maybe just make those procedures commonplace.
"However, in the UK, most of the natural gas imported comes by pipeline from Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. There are no pipelines that allow Russian gas to flow to the UK from Norway (the biggest source of imports)."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43421431#:~:text=However...). (link jumps to the chart)
Manufacturing is and always has been a complicated one. Until there is some global emissions tax upon products that factor in full material to consumer aspects from production and shipping emission - things will never change and the ability to have a local product cost 2x more than some imported one that has 10x the emission, is still going to play out until there is a true emission tax (not just carbon). Hence the whole emission/environment and humanity impacts of industry has no true global standard and the variance of those standards is a difference that we all end up paying the difference, albeit indirectly.
Hence you get workarounds happening like the example you mention about chicken tax - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax workaround that can play both ways, yet if there was a base-level standard and measure to balance things out, then such loopholes become less harder to happen, or needed. Alas the only common standards are weights/measures and currency, everything else does vary.
As an aside, I dare say that the history of importing chickens into Europe is more fascinating than most imagined, and one that still plays on even to this day.
- https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissio...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Here's the obligatory link to the UK's live electricity sources: https://gridwatch.co.uk/