Exports to Europe and US behind 15% of emissions• Campaigners suggest new criteria for climate deal
Duncan Clark
The Guardian, Monday 23 February 2009
The full extent of the west's responsibility for Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases has been revealed by a new study. The report shows that half of the recent rise in China's carbon dioxide pollution is caused by the manufacturing of goods for other countries - particularly developed nations such as the UK.
Last year, China officially overtook the US as the world's biggest CO2 emitter. But the new research shows that about a third of all Chinese carbon emissions are the result of producing goods for export.
The research, due to be published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, underlines "offshored emissions" as a key unresolved issue in the run up to this year's crucial Copenhagen summit, at which world leaders will attempt to thrash out a deal to replace the Kyoto protocol.
Developing countries are under pressure to commit to binding emissions cuts in Copenhagen. But China is resistant, partly because it does not accept responsibility for the emissions involved in producing goods for foreign markets.
Under Kyoto, emissions are allocated to the country where they are produced. By these rules, the UK can claim to have reduced emissions by about 18% since 1990 - more than sufficient to meet its Kyoto target.
But research published last year by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) suggests that, once imports, exports and international transport are accounted for, the real change for the UK has been a rise in emissions of more than 20%.
China, as the world's biggest export manufacturer, is key to explaining this kind of discrepancy. According to Glen Peters, one of the authors of the new report at Oslo's Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, about 9% of total Chinese emissions are the result of manufacturing goods for the US, and 6% are from producing goods for Europe.
Academics and campaigners increasingly say responsibility for these emissions lies with the consumer countries.
Dieter Helm, professor of economics at Oxford University, said "focusing on consumption rather than production of emissions is the only intellectually and ethically sound solution". "We've simply outsourced our production," he added."
By contrast, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), argues that these "embedded emissions" in Chinese-produced goods are not the UK's."The UK calculates and reports its emissions according to the internationally agreed criteria set out by the UN," it says.
However, the Decc admitted to the Guardian that "the footprint associated with the UK's consumption has risen".
Even if world leaders did agree a deal based on consumption rather than production of CO2, it is unclear how national figures would be calculated.
Jonathon Porritt, head of the Sustainable Development Commission, said: "Ultimately, the only place to register emissions is in the country of origin - in this case, China. Otherwise, the whole global accounting system for greenhouse gases will be undermined by the complexity of double-accounting."
The difficulty of measuring exported emissions is reflected in the fact that the new research focuses on the years 2002 to 2005. Relevant trade data is not yet available for subsequent years.
However, Dieter Helm believes these challenges can be overcome with political will. "It's complicated but there are ways of taking consumption into account, such as a border tax on carbon transfer," he said.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Investors targest Exxon and Massey
A coalition of U.S. investors put companies including Exxon Mobil Corp and coal miner Massey Energy Co on a "Climate Watch" list on Wednesday, claiming the long-term competitiveness of the firms could be hurt by their lack of action on climate change. Skip related content
"For a company in a major emitting sector ... to not be thinking about how they are going to address a regulated environment creates red flags for investors," Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors and environmentalists, said in an interview.
Lubber said the companies have lagged in taking action on climate change even though U.S. President Barack Obama plans to regulate emissions of gases blamed for warming the planet.
"Companies that miss this trend will be setting themselves up to fail in the 21st century low-carbon economy," she said.
Ceres, whose institutional investors associated with the Climate Watch report manage a total of $1.9 trillion in assets, said the companies lag behind their peers who have taken actions including moving into alternative energy markets like wind and solar power or assessing their climate change risks.
Ceres said Exxon Mobil Corp has been "unresponsive to investor requests for a decade," on strategies on growing demand for diversified clean energy sources.
Exxon spokesman Chris Welberry said in a email, "We reject this criticism," and that the company has led in energy efficiency investments to reduce emissions.
Ceres put Massey Energy on the list, saying it had resisted shareholder resolutions requesting the company develop and disclose a strategy for responding to climate change. The company did not immediately return a request for comment.
Investors at Ceres, which also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group of 75 institutional investors including the California State Teachers Retirement System, and financial firms focused on the business impacts of climate change, have filed 63 global warming resolutions with the nine companies on the climate list, and others.
TAR SANDS
The group also targeted companies investing in Canada's tar sands, including Chevron Corp, which owns part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, and Canadian Natural Resources, one of the largest producers in oil sands.
Alberta's oil sands rival Saudi Arabia's conventional oil reserves in size, but environmentalists say mining and processing them releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases.
When Obama visits Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa on Thursday, energy will be a key topic in the talks. About 75 percent of Canada's oil sands output is shipped to the U.S. market.
"Extraction of oil from oil sands is a risky proposition and will likely in the long term be a disaster for both investors and inhabitants of an increasingly warming planet," said Margaret Weber, board chair of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which coordinates shareholder filings with Ceres.
Canadian Natural management could not be immediately reached and Chevron did not immediately return phone calls about the investments.
(Additional reporting by Scott Haggett in Calgary; Editing by Christian Wiessner)
"For a company in a major emitting sector ... to not be thinking about how they are going to address a regulated environment creates red flags for investors," Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors and environmentalists, said in an interview.
Lubber said the companies have lagged in taking action on climate change even though U.S. President Barack Obama plans to regulate emissions of gases blamed for warming the planet.
"Companies that miss this trend will be setting themselves up to fail in the 21st century low-carbon economy," she said.
Ceres, whose institutional investors associated with the Climate Watch report manage a total of $1.9 trillion in assets, said the companies lag behind their peers who have taken actions including moving into alternative energy markets like wind and solar power or assessing their climate change risks.
Ceres said Exxon Mobil Corp has been "unresponsive to investor requests for a decade," on strategies on growing demand for diversified clean energy sources.
Exxon spokesman Chris Welberry said in a email, "We reject this criticism," and that the company has led in energy efficiency investments to reduce emissions.
Ceres put Massey Energy on the list, saying it had resisted shareholder resolutions requesting the company develop and disclose a strategy for responding to climate change. The company did not immediately return a request for comment.
Investors at Ceres, which also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group of 75 institutional investors including the California State Teachers Retirement System, and financial firms focused on the business impacts of climate change, have filed 63 global warming resolutions with the nine companies on the climate list, and others.
TAR SANDS
The group also targeted companies investing in Canada's tar sands, including Chevron Corp, which owns part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, and Canadian Natural Resources, one of the largest producers in oil sands.
Alberta's oil sands rival Saudi Arabia's conventional oil reserves in size, but environmentalists say mining and processing them releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases.
When Obama visits Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa on Thursday, energy will be a key topic in the talks. About 75 percent of Canada's oil sands output is shipped to the U.S. market.
"Extraction of oil from oil sands is a risky proposition and will likely in the long term be a disaster for both investors and inhabitants of an increasingly warming planet," said Margaret Weber, board chair of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which coordinates shareholder filings with Ceres.
Canadian Natural management could not be immediately reached and Chevron did not immediately return phone calls about the investments.
(Additional reporting by Scott Haggett in Calgary; Editing by Christian Wiessner)
Forests absorb 20 percent of fossil fuel emissions: study
Wed Feb 18, 2009 2:16pm EST
By Michael Kahn
LONDON (Reuters) - Tropical trees have grown bigger over the past 40 years and now absorb 20 percent of fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere, highlighting the need to preserve threatened forests, British researchers said Wednesday.
Using data collected from nearly 250,000 trees in the world's tropical forests over the past 40 years, their study found that tropical forests across the world remove 4.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
"To get an idea of the value of the sink, the removal of nearly 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by intact tropical forests, based on realistic prices for a ton of carbon, should be valued at around 13 billion pounds per year," said Lee White, Gabon's chief climate change scientist, who co-led the study, said in a statement.
The researchers do not know exactly why trees are getting bigger and mopping up more carbon but they suspect that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be acting like a fertilizer.
While nature has provided a free subsidy for dealing with carbon emissions, it is one that won't last forever because trees can only grow so much bigger, said Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds who led the study.
"The trees are growing just a bit bigger but they make a big difference because there are so many trees and half their mass is carbon," Lewis said in a telephone interview.
"Our study gives us another reason why it is really important to conserve tropical rain forests."
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that human activity produces 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide worldwide each year, but only about 15 billion tons actually stays in the atmosphere and affects climate change.
Human-produced greenhouse gases are blamed for warming temperatures, which experts say will spark heat waves, droughts, more powerful storms, species extinctions and higher sea levels.
Knowing what exactly what happens to the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere will help researchers better
understand future climate change, Lewis added.
The team analyzed data on 250,000 tree records collected from the world's tropical forests over a 40-year period and found that the total mass of trees -- which is mostly in their
trunks -- was getting bigger on average.
As a result, tropical forests absorb more carbon emissions and now make up about half the world's land carbon sink, the researchers said in the journal Nature.
"This is all about what is happening with the trees but we still don't know what is happening with the soils," said Lewis, who noted that oceans absorb about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Will Dunham and Richard Williams)
By Michael Kahn
LONDON (Reuters) - Tropical trees have grown bigger over the past 40 years and now absorb 20 percent of fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere, highlighting the need to preserve threatened forests, British researchers said Wednesday.
Using data collected from nearly 250,000 trees in the world's tropical forests over the past 40 years, their study found that tropical forests across the world remove 4.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
"To get an idea of the value of the sink, the removal of nearly 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by intact tropical forests, based on realistic prices for a ton of carbon, should be valued at around 13 billion pounds per year," said Lee White, Gabon's chief climate change scientist, who co-led the study, said in a statement.
The researchers do not know exactly why trees are getting bigger and mopping up more carbon but they suspect that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be acting like a fertilizer.
While nature has provided a free subsidy for dealing with carbon emissions, it is one that won't last forever because trees can only grow so much bigger, said Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds who led the study.
"The trees are growing just a bit bigger but they make a big difference because there are so many trees and half their mass is carbon," Lewis said in a telephone interview.
"Our study gives us another reason why it is really important to conserve tropical rain forests."
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that human activity produces 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide worldwide each year, but only about 15 billion tons actually stays in the atmosphere and affects climate change.
Human-produced greenhouse gases are blamed for warming temperatures, which experts say will spark heat waves, droughts, more powerful storms, species extinctions and higher sea levels.
Knowing what exactly what happens to the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere will help researchers better
understand future climate change, Lewis added.
The team analyzed data on 250,000 tree records collected from the world's tropical forests over a 40-year period and found that the total mass of trees -- which is mostly in their
trunks -- was getting bigger on average.
As a result, tropical forests absorb more carbon emissions and now make up about half the world's land carbon sink, the researchers said in the journal Nature.
"This is all about what is happening with the trees but we still don't know what is happening with the soils," said Lewis, who noted that oceans absorb about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Will Dunham and Richard Williams)
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
CO2 signs 50-year deal on forest carbon with Vic utility
CO2 signs 50-yr deal with Vic utility 18-February-09 by Edited announcement-->
-->Carbon sequestrian company CO2 Group has signed a 50-year management agreement to build and operate a carbon offset project with a regional water corporation in Victoria. The announcement is below: CO2 Group Limited's wholly owned subsidiary, CO2 Australia today announced it has signed a fifty-year management agreement to build and operate a carbon offset project with the Wannon Regional Water Corporation (Wannon Water).CO2 Australia will establish and manage the carbon sink to help Wannon Water meet its commitments to reducing carbon emissions, by establishing a permanent forest carbon sink using Mallee trees.CEO of CO2 Australia, Andrew Grant, said: "Wannon Water is another example of a utilities provider determined to address its impact on the environment proactively and well ahead of the introduction of the formal emissions trading program."We are pleased to be working with a corporation that is committed to all aspects of sustainability and that we can provide part of the solution to Wannon Water addressing its impact on the environment."Wannon Water Managing Director Grant Green said: "Sustainability is a key driver to the way we do business at Wannon Water. We take our obligations to the environment very seriously and we want to lead by example."We work very hard to educate our community about water sustainability and we pride ourselves on going above and beyond the environmental standards required by law and regulation."As a significant user of energy, we know that we have an obligation to address our carbon emissions profile," Mr Green said."The carbon offsetting project with CO2 Australia is one part of Wannon Water's approach to addressing climate change. We are committed to significantly reducing Wannon Water's greenhouse footprint and to improving energy efficiency."Like Wannon Water, CO2 Australia is a company focused on sustainability. It is able to provide us with real solutions to help address our carbon emissions profile. We have partnered with CO2 Australia because it has the proven ability to deliver certified carbon abatements on a large scale," said Mr Green."As the major provider of water to south west Victoria, Wannon Water is responsible for one of our most precious resources - water - and its use in the region. Carbon emissions, climate change and water are intrinsically linked so it makes sense that we work on all aspects of sustainable practice," Mr Green added.Wannon Water is a regional water corporation operating 5 catchments over an area of 24,000 sq kms in South West Victoria. Wannon Water provides over 15,000 megalitres of water to customers per annum.CO2 Australia is the largest provider of dedicated carbon sink plantings in Australia. It was the first organisation to achieve accreditation for reforestation projects under both the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme and the Federal Government's Greenhouse Friendly™ Program.CO2 Australia is a member of the Chicago Climate Exchange and is positioned to establish carbon sinks recognised under the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. CO2 Australia's carbon offset program has won numerous prestigious international and domestic environment and sustainability awards.
-->Carbon sequestrian company CO2 Group has signed a 50-year management agreement to build and operate a carbon offset project with a regional water corporation in Victoria. The announcement is below: CO2 Group Limited's wholly owned subsidiary, CO2 Australia today announced it has signed a fifty-year management agreement to build and operate a carbon offset project with the Wannon Regional Water Corporation (Wannon Water).CO2 Australia will establish and manage the carbon sink to help Wannon Water meet its commitments to reducing carbon emissions, by establishing a permanent forest carbon sink using Mallee trees.CEO of CO2 Australia, Andrew Grant, said: "Wannon Water is another example of a utilities provider determined to address its impact on the environment proactively and well ahead of the introduction of the formal emissions trading program."We are pleased to be working with a corporation that is committed to all aspects of sustainability and that we can provide part of the solution to Wannon Water addressing its impact on the environment."Wannon Water Managing Director Grant Green said: "Sustainability is a key driver to the way we do business at Wannon Water. We take our obligations to the environment very seriously and we want to lead by example."We work very hard to educate our community about water sustainability and we pride ourselves on going above and beyond the environmental standards required by law and regulation."As a significant user of energy, we know that we have an obligation to address our carbon emissions profile," Mr Green said."The carbon offsetting project with CO2 Australia is one part of Wannon Water's approach to addressing climate change. We are committed to significantly reducing Wannon Water's greenhouse footprint and to improving energy efficiency."Like Wannon Water, CO2 Australia is a company focused on sustainability. It is able to provide us with real solutions to help address our carbon emissions profile. We have partnered with CO2 Australia because it has the proven ability to deliver certified carbon abatements on a large scale," said Mr Green."As the major provider of water to south west Victoria, Wannon Water is responsible for one of our most precious resources - water - and its use in the region. Carbon emissions, climate change and water are intrinsically linked so it makes sense that we work on all aspects of sustainable practice," Mr Green added.Wannon Water is a regional water corporation operating 5 catchments over an area of 24,000 sq kms in South West Victoria. Wannon Water provides over 15,000 megalitres of water to customers per annum.CO2 Australia is the largest provider of dedicated carbon sink plantings in Australia. It was the first organisation to achieve accreditation for reforestation projects under both the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme and the Federal Government's Greenhouse Friendly™ Program.CO2 Australia is a member of the Chicago Climate Exchange and is positioned to establish carbon sinks recognised under the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. CO2 Australia's carbon offset program has won numerous prestigious international and domestic environment and sustainability awards.
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