A UK parliamentary panel on Wednesday found that when measured by consumption Britain’s emissions had actually risen just as sharply (by 20 percent) since 1990 as they had appeared to fall according to a purely territorial measure, citing academic data.
Traded CO2 has largely added to the territorial emissions inventory of countries such as China and India, and subtracted from western Europe, the United States and Japan.
The European Union has now taken the first step in regulating emissions beyond its borders, forcing airlines to pay for the emissions from full flights into and departing from the bloc, prompting a backlash from China and the United States.
Diplomatically, in this case the EU has gone much further than measuring the CO2 of imports, by charging for them as well.
The EU move was a response to a lack of global action.
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has achieved nothing in curbing global aviation CO2, a job it was given 15 years ago.
That inaction mirrors the snail’s pace of wider U.N.-backed talks to agree a global climate deal: countries recently agreed to implement a deal by 2020, after missing previous deadlines.
BORDER TARIFF
A consumption-based measure could be applied across all sectors, not just aviation, perhaps in a ratcheted way, to address a vacuum in international action and increase transparency.
The first step would be simply to measure CO2 emissions from imports, and report these nationally, to bring a new focus.
Including full consumption emissions in national carbon emissions targets would formalise that focus.
A more drastic step would be to add a border tariff (called a carbon border adjustment, or CBA) on the emissions of imports from countries which do not have a carbon price, as the EU has done with airlines. No other country regulates aviation emissions.
One aim of such CBAs would be to protect domestic industry, to stop companies fleeing to jurisdictions with softer environmental laws.
A wider use of CBAs may also turn out to be essential to clinch broader, multilateral climate action, by threatening tariffs against countries which do not sign up.
That could be useful if countries miss their next deadline in 2020, as seems entirely plausible.
“A new climate framework could arise indirectly from the threat of unilateral trade policies,” say researchers in a forthcoming paper to be published in the journal, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, in an article titled “Trade, climate change and the political game theory of border carbon adjustments.”
Source: Thomson Reuters
Gravity always wins!
"One aim of such CBAs would be to protect domestic industry, to stop companies fleeing to jurisdictions with softer environmental laws."
Or, stop imposing unnecessary environmental restrictions that drive companies away to countries with a more realistic approach.