There’s been a flurry of media interest in outsourced emissions in recent weeks, here’s a quick round-up:

• The Guardian’s DataBlog have done some number-crunching on how international trade changes the picture of who’s responsible for emissions.
• They’ve also added to their Climate Change FAQ with an entry, ‘What are outsourced emissions?’
• It’s not just the lefty press covering this though – even the Economist has run a story on it.
• And nef’s Andrew Simms has done a piece attacking the current official emissions accounting system as being ‘mad as a hatter’.

This piece was originally published on the 10:10 blog.

Factoid of the day: China builds about 8 coal power stations a month. Lesser known fact: roughly 2-3 of these power stations are built to make stuff for us in the rest of the world to consume. That’s right: between a quarter and a third of China’s emissions are ultimately the responsibility of us shoppers in the west and elsewhere. China may be the world’s biggest emitter, but it is also the world’s workshop – meaning we’ve happily outsourced a big chunk of our carbon eastwards.

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The UK’s total emissions are set to rise, PIRC can reveal – as shown in yet-to-be-published calculations by the government’s Carbon Trust.

Whilst on paper, Britain’s carbon emissions have declined, in reality they have grown – once emissions from imported goods are factored in. From a consumption perspective, the UK’s emissions have risen by 19% since 1990. New data from the Carbon Trust shows that by 2025 the UK’s total carbon footprint could actually be bigger than it is today, despite legally-binding targets to cut it by a third. Whilst domestic emissions will look smaller, almost half of the country’s footprint will be unseen, as the emissions will originate overseas.

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A striking new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists finds that rich countries’ emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol have been far outweighed by the growth in outsourced emissions driven by rising consumption. Duncan Clark at the Guardian reports.

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has done a piece today on the UK’s outsourced emissions, including extracts from an interview with PIRC’s Guy Shrubsole.

This piece was originally published on Left Foot Forward.

It is the received wisdom that the UK’s emissions are falling. But this is not the case. As academic studies and government briefings show, the UK’s emissions continue to rise, once you factor in the impacts of the goods and services we import from overseas. As we have outsourced industry, so we have outsourced a large part of our contribution to climate change.

In Parliament yesterday, climate change minister Greg Barker became the latest Minister to fail to understand the size of this problem.

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This piece by Guy Shrubsole originally appeared on openDemocracy.

“One of the easiest ways for the United Kingdom to meet its carbon reduction targets,” stated the Liberal Democract peer Lord Teverson in 2010, “is to send offshore even more of its manufacturing and high-carbon-based industry.”

Teverson’s words were intended as a warning rather than a recommendation. But it appears the Government has been following such advice for the past twenty years – because it’s exactly what’s been happening.

As the graph below illustrates, UK emissions as they’re ‘officially’ recorded by Government have been going down. But real UK emissions – the total once you factor in emissions embedded in the goods we consume from overseas – continue to rise.

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