Not hard to do if you outsource your energy production to Russia and others.
- https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissio...
Here's the obligatory link to the UK's live electricity sources: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
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.
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)