Professor Helm argues that important sources such as international transport and tourism are omitted from the UK emissions inventory and if they were included, emissions would have fallen by just 12% since 1990, rather than by the 15% claimed. However it gets worse; Helm thinks that even this figure underestimates UK emissions an dthat in reality the emissions “embedded” in imported products would mean that the real emissions have actually risen by 19%.
In common with others, Helm attributes the fall in official emission figures to the ‘dash for gas’ by electricity generators in the 1990s and the de-industrialisation of the UK economy as it moved to a service economy. While the emissions cuts from the shift to gas-powered generation are real, the falls attributed to the closure of UK factories are actually emissions that have simply been displaced to other countries. He calculated the carbon embedded in products imported into the UK then subtracted the carbon embedded in UK exports from the overall import footprint to calculate that the UK’s “trade deficit in greenhouse gases(GHG)” was 341MtCO2e in 2006 – equivalent to around half of the UK’s measured direct emissions.
These findings suggest that the UK is actually responsible for a significant portion of the growth in emissions in trading partners such as China and India since 1990. The implications for the allocation of GHG reduction goals in a post-2012 international climate agreement are that it strengthens the case for developed countries to take on a greater share of the burden to cut global emissions.
So when you put in your CFC energy saving light bulbs made in China, you may in fact be saving carbon in the UK but in reality it has been expended elsewhere to make it!