Greenhouse gases

The cost of trade

Rich countries are outsourcing carbon-dioxide emissions

WHEN a country reports its carbon emissions to the United Nations, it is the carbon dioxide that goes out of chimneys, exhaust pipes and forest fires of the country’s own territory that gets counted. But what about the carbon emitted elsewhere by people making goods that the country imports? A paper just published in PNAS by Glen Peters and colleagues looks at how the world’s carbon emissions get reapportioned when the carbon used to make traded goods and services is charged against the account of the ultimate consumer, not the initial producer. So while Europe may pride itself on emitting less carbon from its own territory than it did in 1990, from a consumption point of view the carbon embodied in imports from China alone all but cancels out the gain. In general the study finds that net embodied carbon imports into developed countries grew from 400m tonnes in 1990 to 1.6 billion tonnes in 2008—a growth rate faster than that of the world economy or global carbon emissions.