LEED-China Carbon Emission

As the industrial workshops of the world move from Western Europe and America to China and Asia shipping levels have reached an all time high. Aviation is often seen as the bad boys of carbon emissions, the new UN report however shows it is that shipping which is really is the elephant in the room. It is time we take responsibility for our international carbon footprint argues Peter Shield.
The UN figures, recently revealed through a leak to The Guardian, show that the global merchant fleets, previously thought by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to have an annual emissions level of 400 million tonnes, has in reality a footprint of 1.12 billion tonnes. Further more this is expected to rise by 30% by 2020 to 1.475 billion tonnes. The heavily pressured aviation industry, while fast growing, is estimated at having a global footprint of around 650 million tonnes.
These figures, collected by a commissioned group of scientists from the oil and shipping industry for the International Marine Organisation, show the folly of excluding shipping and aviation from Kyoto calculations. It is true that working out a robust assessment and qualification scheme for both aviation and shipping is not the simplest thing in the world, however the inclusion of aviation, but not shipping, into the European Carbon Trading system may finally show one method to do it. Shipping is a little more difficult, but not impossible. While the vast container fleets that sail the world do stop in a number of places to unload while on route, and the goods unloaded at say Rotterdam Europort are then loaded onto lorries and spread to the wind the ships themselves are packed in very precise ways and detailed inventories are kept on the final destination of each container. The records of the fleet operators combined with the records of the national Customs and Excise between them have sufficient detailed records to make the calculations of which country the final destination for the goods. From that it is possible to calculate the share of the shipping emissions each country should take responsibility for.
They also point to another major failing of the way carbon emissions targets are calculated. At the moment a countries carbon emissions are calculated by working out the green house gas emissions are produced by a country, not calculating the carbon emissions of goods and services consumed by each country.
The outsourcing of ‘dirty’ production, manufacturing in essence and all the demands on power the factories require, to China and Asia have seen fast rising emission levels in particular in China and India. However roughly quarter of the goods produced are then packed in containers and shipped to be consumed out of country(23% for 2004 estimate the Tyndall Centre). In 2007 China is estimated as having a total export value of 1.221 trillion dollars, its main exports are machinery, electrical products, data processing equipment, apparel, textile, steel, mobile phones. In 2006 its major export destinations were US 21%, Hong Kong 16% (Though how much was then re-exported to third parties is unknown), Japan 9.5%, South Korea 4.6%, Germany 4.2%.
The UK’s trade deficit with China alone has risen from £2.3 billion in 1999 to £12.3 billion in 2006, it may be as large as £16 billion for 2007 according to figures from the Tyndall Centre.