Xie Zhenhua, vice chair of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that to let emissions rise that high would be a “disaster for the world”.

Chinese per-capita emissions may reach US levels by 2017, a recent study said.

Mr Xie was speaking during a visit to the UK that explored co-operation on clean energy and climate issues.

It included signing a Memorandum of Understanding with UK Energy and Climate Secretary Chris Huhne on areas for joint research.

If the importer had to pay an amount equivalent to the carbon price established by a domestic carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, consumers in the importing state would be made to take the associated emissions into account, economically.

It would also eliminate the incentive to shift production from regulated to unregulated states.

The shame of it is that carbon dioxide is colourless, otherwise we might all have a much greater awareness of how much is generated in manufacturing the products and providing the services that contribute to our per capita emissions.

In the absence of a visual guide that would appeal more directly to our emotions and sense of fair play, we probably will have to rely on a more scientific approach – typically a good method for calculating our Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (indirect purchased power) and Scope 3 (other indirect ) emissions in line with definitions developed by the GHG Protocol Initiative. Trouble is, user friendly web based carbon footprint calculation sites don’t handle Scope 3 (manufactured products and provision of services) emissions very well if at all, whilst companies who would have more resources to develop estimates, have no requirement in law to consider indirect emissions because these are owned and controlled by other entities (which is probably why the GHG Protocol developed the definitions it did).

The best methodology to date is probably that published by the British Standards Institute, PAS 2050:2008. However, this is not a document that Joe Public can use to quickly calculate his per capita emission. Nor is it a document that can yet be used to cacluate the carbon footprint of machinery or equipment (s0 called capital goods), but this is being worked on and in time should generate / validate the kind of numbers that Professor Helm has identified in his papers.

You are right to suggest that many emissions occurring in one jurisdiction can be thought of as being ‘for the benefit’ of people somewhere else.

David MacKay mentions emissions ‘embedded’ in imports in his free book:

“Dieter Helm and his colleagues in Oxford estimate that under a correct account, allowing for imports and exports, Britain’s carbon footprint is nearly doubled from the official “11 tons CO2e per person” to about 21 tons. This implies that the biggest item in the average British person’s energy footprint is the energy cost of making imported stuff.”

Arguably, this makes the development of global climate change policies that are both effective and equitable even more challenging.

There is a growing realisation that per capita figures for consuming nations are probably under reporting the embodied energy / carbon content of finished goods and products, whilst those of producing nations may be over-reporting values. For the latter, emissions do not simply represent a growing standard of living, but also the energy expended in manufacturing goods that subsequently will be exported. If this analysis is correct, then per capita emissions (at the point of consumption, rather than the point of production) for countries such as Canada will be even higher than your graph suggests and correspondingly, figures for China will be lower.

There is also an interesting page in Wikipedia that lists countries andcarbon dioxide emissions per capita. Qatar tops the list probably because of the large quantities of carbon dioxide emitted by its power generation and hydrocarbon processing plants.

Global average CO2 emissions are 4.48 tonnes per person per year. Cutting the world total by 85% means reducing this to 0.672t. Average per capita output in the 38 Annex 1 countries is 9.98 tonnes: to hit this target they must cut their emissions by 93.3% by 2050. If the rich persist in offsetting 50% of this cut, the poorer countries would have to reduce their emissions by 6989mt to absorb our offsets. To meet a global average of 0.672t, they would also need to chop their own output by a further 10838mt. This means a total cut of 17827mt, or 125% of their current emissions. I hope you have spotted the flaw.

A: Are you serious? If you go for the attitude that “there’s only any purpose in big countries cutting their emissions, not small ones”, you reach ridiculous conclusions: first, on a planet in which all countries were the same size as Canada, no-one would do anything. Second, China could easily declare itself to be composed of 33 countries, each the same size as Canada, and invoke your argument to say that there is no point in them doing anything. You need to have a think about the tragedy of the commons. It is EVERYONE’s _per_capita_ footprint that matters. We are all “only one person” and “only paltry”, and the only ethical way forward is that we all have to reduce, especially the gluttons who use 23 t per person per year. Think about it!

Infact any nation with such a figure should not be allowed anywhere neare a discussion on emissions and climate change until they show an accelerating and accelerated downturn.

No can do? No say nothing please!

Thank you. This is the 21st centuary, no one is going to be beholden to a few Western Powermongers.

Leran manners, Learn attitude and Learn to be environmaently friendly. Otherwise SHUT UP and be told.

Avoiding climate catastrophe will probably require going to near-zero net emissions of greenhouse gases this century. That is the conclusion of a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) co-authored by one of my favorite climate scientists, Ken Caldeira, whose papers always merit attention. Here is the abstract:

Current international climate mitigation efforts aim to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, human-induced climate warming will continue for many centuries, even after atmospheric CO2 levels are stabilized. In this paper, we assess the CO2 emissions requirements for global temperature stabilization within the next several centuries, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity. We show first that a single pulse of carbon released into the atmosphere increases globally averaged surface temperature by an amount that remains approximately constant for several centuries, even in the absence of additional emissions. We then show that to hold climate constant at a given global temperature requires near-zero future carbon emissions. Our results suggest that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures. As a consequence, any future anthropogenic emissions will commit the climate system to warming that is essentially irreversible on centennial timescales.

Moral Universalizability and Climate Change: a Restatement