If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes?
Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user.
Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer.
If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time).
It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand.
I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.
In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your location produced it.
If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing to the country with the worst environmental standards, having any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and have no impact on the environment. It also give little incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce emissions.
One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now that is not a very popular concept.
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
What really matters is the negative impact on the environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the population size mother nature isn't congratulating us.
We could talk about population if we had unusually high birth rates, but that's not true. A high birth rate was the default state of all humanity pre-industrialization. Poor countries with high birth rates that plummet as they get richer is normal. A large portion of the world is still poor. Every highly developed country used to have extremely high birth rates in the past. There is nothing unusual about this, this is standard demographic transition. If you care about freedom, you can't just force poor countries to have fewer children. You have to wait for them to get richer and develop, and birth rates will drop automatically.
You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more.
Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point?
The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.