But how much of this is due to Western nations essentially outsourcing emissions to China by shifting manufacturing etc. there?
The per-capita emissions are important because countries with high per-capita emissions likely have a lot of low-hanging fruit.
I mean reducing per-capita emissions in the USA could be done by improving public transport etc. whereas in China it would likely be condemning millions of people to poverty.
I always wonder where this belief comes from. The stuff we buy from China doesn't take that much energy to create compared to, say, driving 10 miles to the grocery store a few times a week.
Consumption-based CO2 inventories, that allocate emissions based on the country of the final end-user, are remarkably close to production-based inventories.
For the US, highly geographically resolved, consumption-based CO2 estimates show that most of our energy goes to suburban land use patterns: tons of transport fuel for lots of driving, and high heating/cooling costs due to detached, poorly insulated buildings. The typical city dweller has a carbon footprint 1/3 of the surrounding suburbanites, and the difference in consumption isn't about the things they buy from China:
There are actually industries which China dominates where the cost of energy is the main driving factor, like aluminium production. The thing is that as far as anyone can tell it makes zero economic sense for that to be made in China in such a polluting way - the only way that they could undercut countries with cheap green electricity to the extent they do is through massive Chinese government subsidies.
>tons of transport fuel for lots of driving, and high heating/cooling costs due to detached, poorly insulated buildings.
We have fixes for these don't we? Electric cars + solar panels could go a long way towards reducing this emissions source. I wonder if the government just aggressively subsidies solar + electric so much so that alternatives go out of business that we might just accelerate the solution to this problem.
The core issue is that people want the suburban lifestyle and they will not downgrade unless the government incentivizes them to or they are forced to due to climate disaster at their doorstep.
We need to drastically scale up battery production to make this happen on a quick enough time scale. Solar panel production is scaling at roughly the appropriate speed, but for cars we will need some people to lessen their driving needs if we want to keep pace with climate goals that are compatible with 1.5C of warming.
Which leads to my second point. I'm not convinced that as many people want the suburban lifestyle as are forced into it. My preference would be to have a non-suburban lifestyle, but it has been banned in most of the US. Our entire legal, tax, and governmental infrastructure is set up to prioritize and prefer suburbia, and it's been that way since WW2. My evidence that more people want alternatives to suburban lifestyles is that suburbia has to legislate its existence. Single family home owners fight super hard against allowing row houses or apartments, and that's the main impediment to their creation, not market forces.
An alternative to scaling battery production for cars is to electrify the highway system so that cars don't need huge batteries to go long distances. A side-benefit of that is it shifts energy use from overnight charging to daytime charging (since that's mostly when people drive around), which would be more compatible energy availability if we convert over to mostly-solar.
> The stuff we buy from China doesn't take that much energy to create compared to, say, driving 10 miles to the grocery store a few times a week.
Transporting the said item overseas, through customs, driven on a truck and a UPS van to my home is less than uhhh what?? Why are we comparing driving 10 miles to grocery store a few times a week?
If you want to objectively compare, you need to analyze kWh of energy spent in the entire supply chain per unit of production whether it is a USB cable from China or a tea pot from a local ceramic shop.
The biggest source of US emissions is driving. About a third. Transporting goods is a tiny tiny fraction of that, as overall transportation emissions account for only slightly more than that.
Driving really is the worst possible thing to do, and we have enshrined mandatory car use in the way that we have laid out our roads, where we allow housing and jobs to be placed, and by banning placement of daily needs next to homes.
EU emissions per capita are a fraction of US emissions, ans most of that comes from how we force people to live in the US.
Read the second part of my comment. It's about 10% from trade based manufacturing. Of course this is difficult to measure, but I think its safe to say the lion's share of CO2 emissions are from consumption.
> And it's not that China is producing emissions during manufacturing goods the entire world consumes. Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" and you'll see ~90% of their emissions are for consumption [2]
Still their per-capita emissions are lower, which is kind of what really matters given nations and borders are essentially a social construction, personal consumption/emissions are not.
As I mentioned previously, reducing China's total emissions would require reducing their per-capita emissions to such a low amount it would essentially be condemning much of the population to live in abject poverty (especially as large parts of the nation has not yet industrialised).
Given the far, far higher per-capita emissions of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia etc. it wouldn't surprise me if China refused to slow economic development in order to reduce emissions.
This is a big factor. China for example has excellent fabrication and assembly services for PCBs. Does anyone know any services in the West that compete with the likes of JLCPCB?
The per-capita emissions are important because countries with high per-capita emissions likely have a lot of low-hanging fruit.
I mean reducing per-capita emissions in the USA could be done by improving public transport etc. whereas in China it would likely be condemning millions of people to poverty.