The illusion of decreasing carbon emissions in the United States
One of the victories claimed by the recently departed George W. Bush was that, during his presidency, he and his administration succeeded in curbing carbon emissions. In 2007, he asked audience members at a fundraiser, “Do you realize that the United States is the only major industrialized nation that cut greenhouse gases last year?”
That claim was immediately questioned, and turned out to be unsubstantiated at the time. But still, in his final days in office, Bush pushed the claim that his administration had made significant strides toward countering global warming.
A recent investigation by Brian Angliss on the blog Scholars and Rogues (I happened upon on it on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climate Progress blog) suggests that Bush’s legacy of combating CO2 emissions is hardly the case — and is much worse than officially reported.
In a fascinating analysis, Angliss finds that the U.S., as its companies outsource more of their operations, has been sending disturbingly large amounts of its CO2 emission to other parts of the world. He argues that the amount of CO2 emissions the U.S. is responsible for is likely 20 percent more than official estimates.
As Angliss explains,
Every product and service requires energy, and thus carbon. Commercial agriculture requires petroleum or natural gas-based fertilizers and diesel fuel for planting and harvesting. Manufacturing requires energy to extract raw materials, petroleum to transport those materials to a factory, energy to convert those materials into products, and yet more petroleum to transport the products to end users. Even services like housecleaning or website hosting have an energy cost, the former in the creation of the chemicals and electric cleaning tools and the latter for the server (a product with its associated energy cost of creation), the electricity used to run the computer, and the energy consumed in constructing the computer center that houses the server have energy costs. And in all cases, the energy cost to create the product or service creates carbon emissions.
And he goes on to write,
These figures illustrate a vitally important conclusion – the U.S. economy demands a huge amount of CO2 emissions beyond it’s borders. The U.S. has essentially offshored its GHG emission problem to the rest of the world, turning their economies into dumping grounds for our own air pollution. Yes, they’ve been paid well for it in U.S. dollars that helped raise the standards of living in the affected countries. But this also means the U.S. has a responsibility to help those countries clean their dirty energy houses.
Such an investigation makes you think about the U.S.’s role in climate change in a whole new way. Our contribution to climate change includes far more than just our behavior, our cars, our homes; it also involves how our goods are made, the people who make them and how they get to us.
