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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

Emissions shift with manufacturing. And for Western countries that means outsourcing to China.

In general, this isn't as big a difference as many claim. On the other hand, the UK is probably an outlier in this regard and exhibits one of the largest such effects, so the reduction given as 50% in the article is more like 35% once imports are accounted for.

Some comparitive graphs in this article:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling

They do address that and mention consumption, and the U.K. is down 32% including import, second to Italy.

Recessions help with emissions. Like in Germany.

This is a long term trend

> Emissions shift with manufacturing. And for Western countries that means outsourcing to China.

Consumption-based emissions are also down for the UK from a peak of 750 Mt down to 500 Mt:

* https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

So much this. Is there anywhere where we can see emissions by what is consumed rather than what is produced?

It's pure politics to outsource everything to China and India then complain that they're the biggest culprits.

It's easy to google this data, see Figure 1 on this link, from official UK statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uks-carbon-footprin...

It is mentioned in the article and they include figures. I’m not convinced by the reliability of those figures, given the carbon intensity of the imports (from a higher carbon grid in China and from the transport)

Other sources put U.K. imports at 30% of total energy use, but you need to include the environmental impact too. Better to import 100MWh of goods from Iceland or Norway than 10MWh from China or India.

The narrative that manufacturing was outsourced to China and India and those same were then blamed for carbon emissions removes agency from China and India.

If they want manufacturing industry, then they should acknowledge the externalities that come with that.

But we want the things they manufacture. I'm arguing for sharing the agency, not putting it all on the UK and others. The climate doesn't care about borders. There's a global demand for manufacturing, we just don't want it in our own backyards.

> Is there anywhere where we can see emissions by what is consumed rather than what is produced?

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Chinese people get paid a lot less so they have a much smaller carbon footprint. It’s an environmental and economic win-win situation.

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