Figure 1: Cartoon depiction of the shift to a consumer based society (Pinterest, 2020)
Picture this, it’s black Friday, you have 20 tabs open ready to buy those shoes you’ve been eyeing now for a while. A week later they have arrived! Where have they come from, where were they made? It’s no lie that we live in a world where policy aims are to increase consumer spending, and that as our overall consumption has increased, so have our emission rates.
The most used theory around gross domestic product and the environment suggests that with an increase in economic growth, emissions do increase at first but so do technological advancements, which in the long run, decrease emissions.
However, this theory, like many targets set to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, tend to focus on reporting emissions within a certain country based on the production level, and neglect consumption. Consumption as the import of goods that have been manufactured elsewhere for consumption within the country. Without including consumption, countries that export more than they import are seen to emit the most, see figure 2.
Figure 2: Production levels within a country (shown as territorial) in relation to consumption levels. Depicting the European Union’s production at a bit less than 4 gigatonnes of CO2 (GTCO2) and their consumption at higher than 4. Whilst China’s production is at around 10GtCO2 and their consumption is at around 8.5 (Ritchie and Roser, 2019).
Although China is the largest emitter of GHG and is contributing to 27% of the world's emissions, it’s per capita emissions is at 7 tons, whilst the United States (US) is at 16.6 tons. Thus, should we be switching away from production-based (PB) methods of calculating countries emissions, and move towards consumption-based (CB)?
The main benefit to moving towards CB surround the idea of fairness. The replacement of PB with CB would create a fairer way of calculating countries emissions, as at the moment mitigation targets are created based on PB emissions, without including the source point of production. This excludes carbon leakages such as transport emissions, as well as the relocation of manufacturers from developed countries to developing countries when strict policies are implemented. CB would incentives the mitigation efforts in developing countries, reduce consumption within countries and strengthen emission reduction efforts in importing countries.
However, as much as this sounds simple and effective, the intricacy of implementation is a concern. To implement CB, large amounts of data are needed from every component required to manufacture a good within a country, which is very difficult to obtain and would lead to inaccurate calculations. Even if these calculations were correct, one unit of imported emission does not always equate to a considerable increase in atmospheric emissions, and hence would not be an appropriate way to assess who should be priced for the emission.
Bottom line, we live in a world manipulated by an invisible hand pushing us to consume and consume. We have forgotten the relationship between a good and the process it took to make it, we simply buy something thinking only about the end product, and not the impacts it has had on our environment. So yes, it does sound complicated to include consumers in the equation, but there needs to be more of a discussion on how to.
As always, thanks for reading!
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