Earth Equity News

Counting Outsourced Greenhouse Gas Emissions. By John M. Broder, NYTimes, March 8, 2010. "One of the stickiest points in international climate change negotiations is how to account for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions produced to make goods that are then sold for export. Should the producing country be held to account for those emissions? Or does the consuming country bear some responsibility for counting those emissions?... The atmosphere does not care where the carbon comes from, but it certainly poses difficult political and policy questions down here on terra firma. Although analysts have pondered this question for years, there has been little hard data to compare carbon imports and exports. But two scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University have published a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required) that aims to quantify how much of each nation's carbon dioxide consumption is produced locally and how much is 'embedded' in imported goods. In the United States, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed per person each year but are produced somewhere else, the co-authors, Ken Caldeira and Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution, found. That is roughly 11% of per capita carbon emissions in the United States and equivalent to driving a 30 mile-per-gallon car more than 7,000 miles."