> 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.).
> 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.
>>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.).