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Comment by ricardo81 | Hacker News Reader

As noted in another comment, some of this can be attributed to manufacturing being done elsewhere and the UK becoming more of a service economy.

Though there are indicators like emissions per kWh of electricity generated that show promise. https://grid.iamkate.com/ ... over the past 10 years the value has went from 475g of CO2 per kWh to ~153g. A contentious part of that value no doubt is that biomass imported from North America is considered carbon neutral. Add in the complications of new growth vs old growth, transportation and the time-sensitive nature of man-made climate change it can perhaps be seen as less advantageous as figures may suggest.

All the same I'm optimistic, particularly in Scotland where a disproportionate amount of green electricity is harvested by population. Our National Grid is playing catch up trying to accommodate intermittent sources and price accordingly.

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> As noted in another comment, some of this can be attributed to manufacturing being done elsewhere and the UK becoming more of a service economy.

This would be an interesting metric... instead of carbon emissions being calculated by the location of "chimneys", a better metric would be a total carbon emissions by all consumpton of the country. Sure, EVs are clean if you buy them in (eg.) UK, but all the polution is done elsewhere, from the dirty lithium production and dirty rare earths production, energy intensive metalworks, etc., but the car is still bought and used in UK, and the UK consumer is the cause for those emissions.

Also many even local policies don't take that in effect, because many things where we 'force' users into 'greener alternatives' are not so green if you count the manufacture (which is done elsewhere, and again, noone cares about that). In many cases, extending the life of a device (car, appliance,...), even with bad energy usage and/or emissions is still greener (looked globally) than buying a new appliance/car and disposing of the old. Sure,the new small EV is "green", but driving your old VW golf for 5 more years could have been greener (again, depends on the distance driven, etc.).

>>the UK consumer is the cause for those emissions.

Sure, but counting it as UK emissions would mean you count it twice, no? If other countries that mine lithium report their own CO2 emissions then if you add the CO2 cost of using electronics made with lithium and used in UK to UK's CO2 emission, that means you have counted the same emissions twice,no?

If you are trying to total all CO2 admissions? Yes.

If you're trying to determine which countries have the biggest impact it could be a valuable metric.

It needs to be done at planet level, otherwise it's emission shifting, not reduction. Moving it from one place to another on the same planet doesn't reduce emissions.

While there's a lot of nuance to this: in carbon accounting it is standard practice to account for the same emission more than once. Carbon inventories are broken out into three different scopes, the first two scopes concern fuel and electricity generation emissions, and the third scope includes everything in your value chain (both upstream and downstream). Therefore the country producing the EV battery would report on the emission in their Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventory, and the country utilising that EV battery would report it within their Scope 3 inventory.

It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission (since ascribing blame is a never-ending game of finger pointing), it is to make every business/consumer responsible. The country creating the emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise, and the country consuming that emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise their full - including international - supply chains.

Ah - that's really interesting, didn't know this. But that means that UK should already be counting CO2 emissions of products sold there(where known), right?

Yes, this is where the *nuance* mentioned at the start of my reply comes in.

It *should* include all scopes, including upstream emissions from purchased goods and services from abroad. But in many countries their country-level carbon inventories still have huge gaps.

UK Legislation implements the GHG Protocol scope system in the UK's carbon accounting regulations that businesses must follow for reporting their emissions (e.g. SECR), and government guidance for calculating emissions all follow the scope system too (e.g. BEIS Conversion Factors guidance). So it is very disappointing if the UK's carbon accounts has got gaps (but I wouldn't be surprised).

> It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission

It's definitely how it is used by activists / NGO etc tho [1].

Another strange practice is to scale the CO2 production with the price of goods. Eg: it is assumed that you produce 10x more CO2 when you buy a $100 bottle of wine than if you buy a $10 bottle of wine. This makes no sense at all from an environmental perspective, but the conclusion you can draw from this are aligned with the political views of the people producing those reports.

1: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/top-5-ways-bill...

Sure, for example I had accounting done as part of a study which also fitted meters (which I wanted anyway) and read the data (which I would likely have freely agreed to but obviously does need formal permission) and their baseline basically go well, about 60% of your income isn't accounted for in these days so we assume you turned that money into carbon emissions at our default rate. Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.

For individuals I don't think this approach works very well, but over a population I can believe it comes out in the wash.

> Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.

That depends on your definitions. I'm not sure about U.K. reserve ratios, but in the U.S., about 90% of your bank deposit goes back out as loans that hopefully increase economic activity. The majority of that activity probably isn't carbon-neutral.

Neither the UK nor the US have a reserve requirement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement

In addition, banks in modern times have never had to wait for deposits to extend loans.

How did I miss the reserve requirement in the US going to zero in 2020? I was living overseas at the time, and I know I had more pressing things to consider, but still...

> In addition, banks in modern times have never had to wait for deposits to extend loans.

Are you referring to the discount window, the repo market, and interbank lending, or the fact that reserve requirements are typically averaged over a couple of weeks? In these cases, (as long as there's a reserve requirement), a person adding to a bank does still enable more lending, no? Or, are you saying that in modern times, even with non-zero reserve requirements, commercial banks usually operate with excess reserves, so reserves are not the limiting factor on lending?

This is what I read from the Bank of England:

> The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks

> Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Specifically, in my case, that bank is (mostly) NS&I, one of several banks owned by the British government.

NS&I doesn't write loans, nor does it have a big vault full of cash somewhere, instead my money is "invested" in running the country I live in. Rather than borrowing money from international money markets by writing gilts (bonds payable by the government) they borrow my money and pay me interest.

As a result, nothing changes, all the same things were going to happen anyway, just they'd have borrowed from the Chinese, or the Americans or whoever was buying gilts.

On the 1x vs. 10x point, I believe the unit quantity is derived by finding the manufacturing costs (in CO2) for a given process and then extrapolating. No one is counting the grams of CO2 of your cheeseburger. They're counting the CO2 of the whole farm.

They do the same double accounting for green credits. If a country produce green energy it get accounted there. If they then sell that energy it get accounted a second time by the country who buys it. The exporter (possible a separate company from the producer) can even account it a second time, as can the consumer in the end.

Basically every time green energy has changed hand there are two new credits being created, and with a international energy market there is a lot of opportunities for energy to change ownership.

Ironically you have written "twice, no?" twice.

The search term you’re looking for is “consumption based emissions”. There the uk in 2021 was down >30% from its peak, though the number for this year may be lower. Example: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...

46% of 'British Peoples' carbon emissions are released overseas (2016)

https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-04/FINAL-WWF...

> In 2016, 54% of the UK’s carbon footprint was domestically sourced with the remaining 46% coming from emissions released overseas to satisfy UK consumption. The overseas proportion of the UK’s carbon footprint increased substantially – from just 14% in 1990 – thus reducing the scope of UK climate policy to affect emissions associated with consumption.

> if you count the manufacture (which is done elsewhere, and again, noone cares about that)

Please stop feeding that myth. There is a lot of anti-green propaganda built on it. The area of research is called lifecycle analysis and is one of the most heavily studied recently, precisely because we need facts to base an energy transition on. There is plenty of published and reviewed research.

Trade adjusted emissions are also down. The percentage due to trade has increased over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...

Note: 1. the US hasn’t seen such a big change so this thinking doesn’t really carry over to there.

2. The chart is a percentage of domestic production so decreasing domestic production while holding emissions due to trade constant would make the line go up.

> As noted in another comment, some of this can be attributed to manufacturing being done elsewhere and the UK becoming more of a service economy.

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

33% is still pretty good.

Britain has been one of the highest trading nations in the world for centuries. That's what their colonies were for.

So I don't think it's as simple as British manufacturing all having moved overseas. A lot of British consumption was being manufactured overseas even before the last few decades.

It's entirely possible that this is because of that, but I don't think one should be so quick to jump to that conclusion specifically for a country that is famous almost entirely for their "Empire".

British manufacturing is still in decline, e.g. Bloomberg published a graph yesterday showing how the British car industry output shrunk by half since Brexit in 2016.

Brexit didn't happen in 2016, just the vote to begin the process, so the fact that Bloomberg are making this claim is misleading. Additionally when Brexit actually did get implemented it's had no effect on trade, in fact trade with the EU is up slightly. But that's all expected for anything to do with the UK in the media these days. They will keep lying and manipulating people on this topic forever.

You don't need a final legislative change to impact inward investment and manufacturing location when everyone knows it's coming. The Brexit vote hit investment confidence and manufacturing long before the final withdrawal agreement because the writing was on the wall and manufacturers avoid risk.

"No effect on trade" is definitely not true, I've personally had multiple exporting clients go bust due to trade restrictions and even if their volume of trade is exactly replaced, the balance and make up of trade is different (it isn't just that, however).

No it didn't. The economy was growing at the time of the vote and continued to grow after it, a bit faster even. Unemployment hit record lows.

You may be thinking of the predictions of the remain campaign which very heavily featured the idea that even the vote itself, without any actual legal changes, would trigger a recession due to "uncertainty". But that was wrong, it never happened.

Check the trade stats for yourself. Trade is down but that's because of the huge damage of lockdowns and other terrible policies. Brexit would show up as a reduction in trade with the EU faster than elsewhere, but that didn't happen, the proportion remained about the same. This data comes from the government itself. Seeing any Brexit effect in the recorded data just isn't possible.

That's surprising given that even most leave campaigners accepted that there would be some impact, no but in the end it seems the single market was basically a mirage. It never did much for services which is the bulk of the UK economy.

Again, if you don't believe me, check the data for yourself.

This report from the UK Parliament, says otherwise: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

The report admits that the trade was affected by Brexit and other factors and it's difficult to separate one cause from the other. The report also notes that the way data is tracked and compiled changed since Brexit.

The trade with the EU in pounds was highest in 2022, and lower in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2019. The report says it's not adjusted to inflation. In terms of % of the total trade, it's the lowest ever in 2022.

It says the same thing I just said. Did you read the report or just the summary? The summary looks like some civil service bias, as it doesn't actually state the most important facts to know clearly. But the report itself does make it clear.

Look at the actual PDF, in particular the graph on page 12 (JIM7/JIM8). This is inflation adjusted goods trade. As you can see Brexit has had no impact whatsoever. Inflation adjusted goods imports are about where they were in 2018. Inflation adjusted exports are about where they were in Jan 2020.

There was a very brief drop in both when the new controls came in. The disruption lasted only a period of months before trade resumed as before.

In other words, there's nothing to see here. This is the opposite of what was stated as 100% certainty by supposed economic experts. Anyone who said before the vote that leaving wouldn't have bad economic consequences was roundly shat upon as a expertise-denying dolt. Yet they were correct.

In terms of % of the total trade, it's the lowest ever in 2022.

The report states clearly: "The proportion of the UK’s total exports going to the EU has generally been declining gradually over the last 15-20 years". It's due to the rise of China/India as more important trading partners, so that would be expected even if the UK had stayed in.

Now look at the graph on page 15. It shows a smooth long term decline in the EU's importance as a trading partner. In particular there was no drop in relative exports to the EU after Brexit, again, despite clear promises that it'd have a huge effect.

What we can see from the report you cited is two things:

1. What I said is correct. Brexit has had no impact on trade. This shows up clearly when using inflation adjusted statistics - it's all a continuation of prior long term trends. Therefore by implication, EU membership was useless for the economy and the entire basis of the Remain campaign was therefore a lie (but did they realize that?!)

2. It's very easy to be misled by Remain bias in the establishment. The summary for "statistics on EU-UK trade" doesn't mention the lack of Brexit impact anywhere despite it being the most important result by far, with the result that you thought you were contradicting me without doing so.

Feel free to omit the "Brexit" word from my comment and just consider it saying "auto manufacturing lost 50% of the output since 2016", I have zero doubts it was declining before that year too.

Mmm, you should have doubts about that. Between 2010 and 2016 car production was growing, not in decline.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/car-production

Then it turned around and entered a period of decline until 2021, when it started growing again.

The big impacts on UK auto production since 2000 have been the GFC, lockdowns and then the semiconductor supply crisis caused by the lockdowns (in 2021).

It may be worth reflecting on why you were so 100% sure about it being in decline before 2016. Where did you get that impression? Probably places like Bloomberg, whose goal is to create ideological converts, not inform.

I assumed that the colonies were there to provide the raw materials which were shipped to British factories. The finished goods were then exported to the colonies and other countries.

I wonder if it's a similar effect like after the German reunification, but caused by Brexit instead? Total emissions for Germany as a whole dropped by around 35% during the 90's because the non-competitive East German industry was essentially shut down overnight. 35% emission drop looks great in headlines, but only if one ignores the economic side effects (of turning the lives of 16 million people upside down).

PS: looking at the graph the sharp downward turn already started in 2006, so probably not Brexit...

It really started with the "dash to gas" [1] in the nineties. We had gone through some painful labor disputes in the coal industry which the government was keen to avoid. Alongside that the generating industry was privatised. This encouraged a lot of investment in gas. Also we were getting a ton of grief from Norway about all the acid rain from sulphur which had to be dealt with [2].

The Tory government which has been in power since 2010 was somewhat sceptical about wind power and shut down new onshore development when they came in. Fortunately their coalition partner negotiated the continued development of offshore which has been huge since then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain

Hi, sorry but how can the Tories have coalition partners? The UK has 3 major parties and the other 2 are generally the coalition, right? I'm not too familiar with UK politics.

Really two major parties. In 2010 neither of those parties gained enough seats in parliament to gain a majority so they formed a coalition with one of the minor parties which tipped the scales in their direction.

The system is somewhat archaic and well overdue reform but neither of the major parties wants that for obvious reasons.

Biomass is a small impact. The next big impact will be ever increasing wind power and the shift from gas to electric for heating.

Drax which burns biomass is self-styled as "the UK's largest renewable power station"

Right now it’s generating less power than Solar - in the depth of winter, 8%

Gas is 50% higher at 12% and that doesn’t include the gas usage in keeping homes warm

Wind (32%) imports and nuclear are all higher than gas for the electricity generation, let alone imported wood generation.

It's not ideal to compare at any point in time. It's a clear day (and midday), not long after a storm has passed generating record levels of wind energy - during a national holiday when demand is always low (and prices often go into negative territory)

I'm not disagreeing what'll be the next impact, just saying Drax and biomass is perhaps worth more than the statement of it being 'small impact'.

In 2022 biomass was 5%

https://www.edie.net/what-did-the-uks-electricity-generation...

It is worth bearing in mind that it can be seen as stored energy that can be used at any point in time, unlike wind and solar.

In other words, 5% as an average means it's far higher during periods lacking light and wind.

Solar is down as 4.4%, though in peak Summer during the day it can satisfy about a 1/4 of demand, cheaply.

It’s not clear if solar includes reduced demand from rooftop solar, or just grid connected solar

Either way 5% is a tiny amount.

biomass is also far better than gas for those times when you do need to boost supply, so increasing biomass still seems like a win.

agreed. It can seem counter-intuitive with biomass since it's "burning trees", but generally it's a carbon neutral process or far closer to one than burning buried fossil fuels.

Drax is huge, and now burns canadian imported wood rather than coal which is was built for because it can be considered carbon-free.

Farmed wood should actually be considered carbon neutral. Other than transportation cost and the carbon emitted during harvesting, it’s a legitimate way of capturing carbon from the atmosphere and then just emitting the same carbon back

The problem is that at this point we need to be actually capturing carbon and not re-emitting it.

Capturing carbon is literally a fantasy. Other than growing forests there is no hope we can invent a technological way out of our carbon emissions by capturing them. Companies which promise otherwise are essentially a scam.

And growing forests is a viable option but the problem is that the carbon is only captured for as long as you don't burn the wood or let it rot, it has to be either buried or turned into things which ultimately won't release their CO2 back into the air.

If we can increase our CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere we can become carbon neutral faster as increased concentrations drive forest growth and allow plants to grow in previously desert regions.

Grow a forest, convert the wood into charcoal, then store it in a salt mine.

Converting to charcoal is pointless, just burry biomass which is how we got fossil fuels in the first place.

A dump beats every commonly proposed method of carbon sequestration because people pay you to take it and all you need to do is prevent that carbon from entering the atmosphere.

Farmed wood shouldn’t be considered carbon neutral as there’s transportation and other factors to include

Plus we should avoid burning captured carbon

> As noted in another comment, some of this can be attributed to manufacturing being done elsewhere

This is an excellent point. Are there reports similar to TFA that accounts for this? I mean a report that calculates the total demand a country is putting on carbon emissions (directly or indirectly) will be more insightful.

I note that the article mentions that the peak was in 1970, perhaps earlier than most countries.

I think that this may be linked to North Sea gas and conversion from coal to natural gas. And also the decimation of industry that occurred during the 70s and 80s.

Indeed, great points.

Generally these articles use 1990 as a frame of reference. To be fair based on the initial graph shown alone, the UK has almost reached 50% of 1990 values also, though perhaps other countries have already achieved 50% of 1970 values.

> Our National Grid is playing catch up

Nah - they're thinking of playing catch-up in 5-10 years time when they've done the paperwork to get permission to start catching up...

> some of this can be attributed to manufacturing being done elsewhere and the UK becoming more of a service economy.

Worth remembering the UK still manufactures more than France, and had a comparable amount of manufacturing as a percentage of GDP as other Western countries.

There’s a real problem of transparency and opacity of actual numbers when it comes to contribution to global warming, diseases, and other issues at scale. It’s a shame and it’s not clear how we can do better without some real technological breakthrough in measurement

Maybe just measure CO2 in the atmosphere? And maybe put international pressure on the largest emitters? (China and India)

China is where Walmart gets their cheap crap (and Apple their iPhones ), tax the CO2 and the people shopping at Walmart get mad that everything's more expensive. Slash, the manufacturers look for other countries where maybe the CO2 expulsion is under the limit, or the reporting isn't that robust... Because hey if they're not competitive price-wise, the customers look elsewhere for their cheap crap...

je vous presente https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Mecha...

Ah yes, clearly it's only those people shopping at Walmart that would not be happy about price increases. More than that, it's only that cheap crap that they buy that would get more expensive. Enlightened people like you will just stand above it and buy nothing but organic, locally sourced crap!

With a high carbon footprint due to the price local labour is paid and the amount of stuff they purchase. When you buy from China and India you know people are only getting paid enough to just buy food and a small place to live, drastically reducing their carbon footprint.

Nah, I also like my products as cheap as possible. As do you (if I can guess). Hey, aren't we all good members of this capitalistic system?

Sadly the masses will vote for their near-term interest and not to avoid +3 degree C catastrophe they haven't paid attention about, which is anyway "many many years in the future".

That's measured already since the 60s. You never see any reference to it because what it shows is a constant rate of increase that is entirely unaffected by literally anything you can think of. Rise of China? No impact. Lockdowns and the global air travel shutdown? No impact. Renewables revolution? Invisible. Great recession? Of course not. And all the international conferences and agreements.... well, you get the picture.

This fact is discouraging which is why the media and government enforce a blanket silence about it. Along with many other aspects of climate science.

There’s a Chinese saying, that if you apply weights and measures people will use the weights and measures to cheat and steal.

This time we stop measuring emissions and just focus on reducing emissions. And that would mean reducing consumption.

I'm as much of an anti-Taylorist as anyone, but how do you even know whether emissions are reduced without measurement?

Reducing "consumption" (of what? measured how?) is probably impossible in a democratic economy - that's known as a recession and tends to cause a change of party.

We have a seal what increases emissions: driving, flying, buying things, heating, cooling,… I mean, it’s pretty obvious.

Focusing on those, rather than trying to quantify, the emissions, released, is much easier. It’s much easier for me to know how much I buy then to try to find out how much admissions are omitted between the things I buy.

For example, trying to figure out the emissions created by buying a Tesla for a high mileage, gas powered car. What really matters most? The best answer is buying neither of them. Second best sensor is buying and driving it much less, those both matter more than how much admissions are created by the creation or use these vehicles.

They still arguing about how much emissions are caused by elect versus high-efficiency, gas, powered vehicles. In fact, we have something that easily quantifiable versus something that’s almost unquantifiable.

We all just need to do a lot less. But that’s why people focus on emissions and not use, because it’s the thing they don’t want to hear.

“We just need to do less”

“But that’s called a recession. It won’t happen”

“WE JUST NEED TO DO LESS”

For better or worse, in a democracy anyone who tells the populace to scale back their lifestyle will not get elected. “We need to do less” is not a solution. It’s wishful thinking.

What other solutions are there? Make our current lifestyle less carbon-intensive over time. Yeah it’s not as good as perfect collective action, but it has the advantage of actually being possible.

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