Rich nations doubly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions - global problems

Statement by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Hezri A Adnan (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)Tuesday 6 December 2022Inter Press Service

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, 6th December (IPS) – Natural flows do not respect national borders. The atmosphere and oceans cross international borders with little difficulty, as greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other liquids, including pollutants, cross borders with ease.

However, in multilateral fora, strategies to combat climate change and its impacts remain largely national. GHG emissions – typically measured as carbon dioxide equivalents – are the main basis for evaluating national climate protection commitments.

Hezri A. AdnanAssessing National Responsibility Jayati Ghosh, Shouvik Chakraborty, and Debamanyu Das have been critical of assessing national climate responsibility. The standard method – used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – measures greenhouse gas emissions from activities within national borders.

This approach allocates GHG emissions to the country where goods are produced. Such carbon accounting focuses the blame for global warming on emerging economies. But it ignores who is consuming the goods where, diverting attention from those most responsible for historical emissions.

As a result, attention has focused on large national issuers. China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and other large emerging economies – especially the “late industrializers” – have become the new climate villains.

China, the United States and India are now the world’s top three emitters of greenhouse gases in absolute terms, accounting for more than half of the total. With faster growth in recent decades, China and India have greatly increased emissions.

Undoubtedly, some developing countries have seen rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly during periods of high growth. In the first two decades of this century, such emissions increased more than three-fold in China, 2.7-fold in India, and 4.7-fold in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, most rich economies have seen a smaller increase or even decrease in emissions as they “outsource” labor and energy-intensive activities to the Global South. Production emissions in the USA and Japan fell by 12% in the same period, and by almost 22% in Germany.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram Masking inequalities Comparing total national emissions is not only biased, it is also misleading as countries have very different populations, economies and structures.

But a fair determination of responsibility for global warming is necessary to ensure a fair sharing of the burden of adequate climate action. Most negotiations and discussions on climate change typically refer to aggregated national emissions and income measures rather than per capita values.

But such a framing obscures the underlying inequalities. A per capita view that compares average GHG emissions offers a more nuanced, albeit understated, perspective on the associated global disparities.

Thus, despite recent reductions, rich economies are still the largest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita. The US and Australia spit out eight times more per capita than developing countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil.

Despite its recent increases in emissions, even China emits less than half the US per capita. Meanwhile, annual emissions growth fell from 9.3% in 2002 to 0.6% in 2012. Even The Economist conceded that China’s per capita emissions in 2019 were comparable to those of western industrialized nations in 1885!

Several developments have contributed to rich nations’ recent reductions in emissions. Richer countries can better afford “climate-friendly” improvements by switching energy sources from the most polluting fossil fuels to lower-greenhouse-gas options like natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy.

Changes in international trade and investment in the wake of “globalization” have led to many rich countries shifting their greenhouse gas-intensive production to developing countries.

Thus, rich economies have “exported” the production of – and responsibility for – greenhouse gas emissions for what they consume. Instead, developed countries are making more of “high-value” services, many of which are finance-related and require far less energy.

Export Emissions, Shift Blame In doing so, rich countries effectively adopted the suggestion of then World Bank chief economist Larry Summers to export toxic waste to the poorest countries, where the “opportunity cost” to human life was probably lowest!

His original proposal has now become a development strategy for the age of globalization! For example, polluting industries – including greenhouse gas-emitting production processes – have been relocated to the Global South along with labour-intensive industries.

Although not included in the final published version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, over 40% of developing countries’ greenhouse gas emissions were due to export production to developed countries.

Such “emission exports” by rich OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries increased rapidly from 2002 after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). These peaked in 2006 at 2,278 million tonnes, ie 17% of emissions from production, before falling to 1,577 million tonnes.

For the OECD, the “carbon balance” is calculated by subtracting the carbon dioxide equivalent of GHG emissions for imports from those for production, including exports. Annual growth in GHG emissions from exports was 4.3% faster than for all manufacturing emissions.

Thus, in 2019, the US had eight times more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than India. US emissions per capita were more than three times those of China, although the world’s most populous country still emits more than any other nation.

As products with high greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly manufactured in developing countries, rich countries have effectively “exported” their emissions. Rich economies that consume such imports are still responsible for the associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Change is in the air Industries that emit carbon have been “exported”—relocated abroad—so that their products are imported for consumption. But the UNFCCC approach to assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions only focuses on production and ignores consumption of such imports.

So if consumption is also responsible for GHG emissions, the per capita differences between the Global North and South are even larger.

In contrast, the OECD wants international corporate tax revenues to be distributed according to consumption rather than production. Therefore, conflicting criteria are used at will to favor rich economies that shape both tax and climate discourses and rules.

While domestic investment in China has become much “greener”, foreign direct investment by local companies is developing coal mines and coal-fired power plants abroad, for example in Indonesia and Vietnam.

If left unchecked, such foreign direct investment will put other developing countries on the worst fossil fuel path, historically emulating the rich economies of the Global North. A Global Green New Deal would instead allow for a “big push” to “frontload” investments in renewable energy.

This should allow for adequate funding for much more equitable development while ensuring sustainability. Such an approach would not only address inequalities at the national level, but also international disparities.

China now produces over 70% of photovoltaic solar panels annually, but is effectively restricted from exporting them abroad. A more cooperative world would encourage lower-cost—more affordable—production of renewable energy resources in developing countries.

Instead, now-higher energy costs — due to supply disruptions following the Ukraine war and Western sanctions — are being used by rich countries to further backtrack on their inadequate, modest commitments to slowing global warming.

This retreat puts the world at greater risk. The international community is already being called upon to abandon the maximum allowable rise in temperature above pre-industrial levels, thereby further expanding and deepening the already unfair North-South relationship.

But change is in the air. Investing in and subsidizing renewable energy technologies in developing countries looking to electrify can allow them to thrive while mitigating global warming.

Hezri A Adnan is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.

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