Developed countries are “outsourcing” more than a third of their carbon emissions associated with products and services to other countries, according to a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science. To be meaningful, regional climate policy thus needs to take into account emissions embodied in trade, not just domestic emissions.

This map shows the flow of carbon emissions embodied in trade among the major exporting and importing countries. Net exporting countries are in blue and net importers in red. China is by far the largest exporter of carbon dioxide emissions. Arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow; numbers are megatonnes. (Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science)

The study finds that, per person, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. The United States is both a major importer and a major exporter of emissions embodied in trade. The net result is that the U.S. outsources about 11% of total consumption-based emissions, primarily to the developing world.

Says co-author Ken Caldeira, a researcher in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology:

Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume.

Caldeira and lead author Steven Davis, also at Carnegie, used published trade data from 2004 to create a global model of the flow of products across 57 industry sectors and 113 countries or regions. By allocating carbon emissions to particular products and sources, the researchers were able to calculate the net emissions “imported” or “exported” by specific countries.

For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. In Switzerland and several other small countries, outsourced emissions exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted within national borders. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.

Davis explains:

Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China. On the flip side, nearly a quarter of the emissions produced in China are ultimately exported.

Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.

The report is published online in the March 8, 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The U.S. posted its biggest-ever decline in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in 2009, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). But the reductions are not expected to continue:

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels fell by an estimated 6.3 percent in 2009. Emissions from coal led the drop in 2009 CO2 emissions, falling by nearly 11 percent. Declines in energy consumption in the industrial sector (a result of the weak economy) and changes in electricity generation sources are the primary reasons for the decline in CO2 emissions (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Looking forward, projected improvements in the economy contribute to an expected 1.5-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2010. Increased use of coal in the electric-power sector, and continued economic growth, combined with the expansion of travel-related petroleum consumption, lead to a 1.3-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with increases in 2010 and 2011, projected CO2 emissions in 2011 are lower than annual emissions from 1999 through 2008.

The drop in emissions in 2009 was the biggest since data collection began in 1949. The Great Recession was primarily responsible, as U.S. real gross domestic product dropped 2.4% in 2009, in the biggest decline since 1946. Emissions dropped 5.8% in 2008.

It’s hard enough imagining the U.S. and other developed nations voluntarily sacrificing economic growth, much less embracing voluntary frugality. Can you even imagine China and India voluntarily giving up their ambitions to join the developed world? The entire world has joined in a suicide pact.

It’s beginning to look like the only thing that will save humans and other living things from the ravages of global warming is global economic collapse.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has posted some revealing graphs showing past carbon emissions – and projected future carbon emissions from China.

First, a history of carbon emissions. Notice emissions didn’t really start to take off until the 1950s.

Next, a closer look at emissions since 1965, broken out by major contributors.

Future Chinese emissions make doubtful any prospect of avoiding dangerous or even catastrophic global warming, whether or not the Chinese economy continues along its current growth path.

Exactly how is the world going to achieve 20% cuts (from 1990 levels) by 2020, much less 80% by 2050? Copenhagen sure doesn’t leave much room for optimism.

Amanda Gelder has a great interview with Jeremy Rifkin at Culturelab. What I find most intriguing are the connections Rifken draws among psychology, politics, and economics. We find ourselves in a pickle of historic proportions at the moment at least in part because of errors in thinking about these things.

I’ll try to pull together a couple of threads to focus on economic thinking and its relationship to the global crisis we face:

The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. . .

A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.

* * *

Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That’s why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren’t thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation’s self-interest.

* * *

A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Rifken thinks the new world of distributed knowledge and distributed energy means we’ve moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus. His vision is attractive. I wish I could share his optimism. Still, we too often forget that philosophy does not live just in acedemia – it has real world implications. The “market” we have come to deify today is really nothing more than a myth, a powerful one that has turned destructive and threatens to consume civilization itself.

Rifkin has just published a new 600-page book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which he expands on the ideas explored in the interview. I recall in my college days (note we were flower children of the 60s) reading books about evolving human consciousness.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s  The Phenomenon of Man. Lancelot Law Whyte’s The Next Development in Man. Remember Charles Reich’s The Greening of America? Answer: not without some embarrassment.

So count me skeptical. My remaining aspirations are much less ambitious than forging a new human consciousness, rather just to eat well and live warmly in an increasingly uncertain world.

Osama bin Laden in a new tape blames the industrialized states and the U.S. in particular for causing climate change:

This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally - and about the action we must take.  Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury - the phenomenon is an actual fact.

Bin Laden gives European nations a bit of credit for signing the Kyoto Protocol and agreeing “to curb the emission of harmful gases” but puts the finger on Bush and global corporations:

George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs. They are also behind ‘globalisation and its tragic implications’. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money.

Bin Laden calls for targeting the U.S. economy in retribution by boycotting American products and ending dollar hegemony:

They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the US dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible. I am certain that such actions will have grave repercussions and huge impact.

It’s hard to argue with the facts. Here’s a chart of cumulative emissions from 1900 through 2002.

The fact that Chinese emissions are growing fast and have now overtaken U.S. emissions on an annual basis doesn’t do much to relieve the U.S. of its overall responsibility.

Micronesia is forging new precedent in global environmental law by claiming it is adversely affected by a Czech coal-fired power plant and thus entitled to relief under Czech law.

Micronesia filed a plea with the Czech environment ministry using a measure designed originally to settle disputes between near neighbors, arguing:

The Federated States of Micronesia is seriously endangered by the impacts of climate change, including the flooding of its entire territory and the eventual disappearance of a portion of its state. . . . The commissioning or retrofit of any large coal power plant could play a relevant role in the destruction of the entire environment of our state.

It may be too late for Micronesia. A new study suggests that Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier has passed its tipping point and is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimeters.

Pine Island glacier is but one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Climate change is warming the Amundsen Sea, which is at the southern margin of the Pacific Ocean. As rising sea levels push the warm water beneath the ice shelves, it melts them from below, pushing the grounding line higher up the continental shelf.

By raising sea levels, and therefore the grounding line, in their model, the scientists identified a point of no return beyond which the glacier would be unable to recover.

The Antarctic sea bed has a small lip in it: it rises slowly up the continental shelf, then makes a slight dip before rising again to the shoreline. The researchers found that as long as the grounding line is on the outer rise of the sea bed, before the lip, small changes in climate lead to correspondingly small changes in the glacier’s ice volume. But as soon as the grounding line moves over the lip and starts to move down into the dip in the sea bed, the situation changes critically. Once the grounding line passes the crest, a small change in the climate causes a rapid and irreversible loss of ice.

News isn’t good from the other pole, either. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley,  predict that replacing tundra with trees will melt sea ice and greatly enhance warming over the entire Arctic region.

Because trees are darker than the bare tundra, scientists previously have thought that the northward expansion of trees would result in more absorption of sunlight and a consequent local warming.

During past episodes of warming, broad-leaved deciduous trees expanded their range north even more quickly than needle-leaved trees. While not not as dark as evergreen trees, broad-leaved trees transpire a lot more water. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that becomes well-mixed throughout the Arctic.

Taking account of this in a standard model of global warming, the researchers discovered that, while broad-leaved trees do absorb some additional sunlight, the water vapor they pump into the atmosphere causes a more widespread warming.

The increased water vapor would melt more sea ice, resulting in more absorption of sunlight by the open ocean and dumping more water vapor into the atmosphere. This positive feedback will warm the land even more and encourage faster, more efficient tree growth and perhaps an even faster expansion of trees into the Arctic.

For anyone concerned about the impact of emissions from the transportation sector on global warming (or complacent about peak oil), this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at his blog Early Warning should be sobering:

Heading Out at The Oil Drum reports the Chinese purchased 13.6 million cars and light trucks last year, compared to 10.4 million sold in the USA. China is now the world’s #1 auto market. Not surprisingly, Chinese oil imports are also up. In December, Chinese imports of crude oil rose to 20 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 4.7 million barrels a day. Chinese demand is helping keep oil prices firm despite the continuing global economic disruption.

Then again, this chart from another Staniford post looking at urbanization trends shows that urbanization and vehicle use are in lockstep, growing exponentially :

Of course, correlation does not establish causation. But Staniford shows that as the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declines and as countries “develop” and become urbanized, per capita energy use tends to increase.

The global climate and energy outlook is grim as China begins to look more and more like us. And notice India, looming there on the horizon.

A deal was reached at the last minute in “Nopenhagen” among the U.S. China, India, Brazil and South Africa. About 25 other nations signed on, but other countries instead agreed only to “take note” of the document – that is, to simply recognize that it exists.

Obama called “Copenhagen Accord” a “meaningful and unprecedented” step to slow global warming. Bill McKibben described it as “non-binding, unfair, and breathtakingly unambitious.”

Lars-Erik Liljelund, the director general of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s office, had a different take:

The meeting was a disaster. The process needs to be changed because if we continue like this, we won’t be any further a year from now.

The deal reached calls for voluntary steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Obama admitted the agreement is just empty talk:

It will not be legally binding, but what it will do is allow for each country to show to the world what they are doing.

The Copenhagen accord “recognizes” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2° C above pre-industrial levels. But the accord calls for only a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 (80% in developed countries), and does not contain any actual commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal. As a U.N. secretariat memo that was leaked at conference shows, the “voluntary” cuts on offer would produce a rise of at least three degrees and a CO2 concentration of at least 550 ppm, not the 450 ppm that supposedly is necessary to hit the 2° C target. The best guess from the modelers at Climate Interactive was that the proposals various countries were making might yield a world about 3.52° C warmer, with a carbon concentration of 770 ppm. That’s far from the 350 ppm scientists now believe is necessary to avoid climate catastrophe.

A decision on targets for reducing carbon emissions by 2020 was put off until next month.

The accord also establishes a goal of developed countries “mobilizing jointly 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries,” predicated on developed countries judging the mitigation actions to be “meaningful” and “transparent.” Trillions shoveled to the bankers, no questions asked. A pittance to save the planet, someday – and that “goal” hedged to the hilt.

The developing countries also pledged $30 billion for the period 2010 – 2012, with priority to be given to the most vulnerable developing countries. The money would be split between adaptation and mitigation, including forestry. Ian Fry of the drowning island-nation Tuvalu  compared it to “being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future”.

The accord ends with a promise to take another look in 2016 – and perhaps to consider a 1.5° C target at that time.

In what is becoming a familiar refrain, Obama told delegates to quit bitching – an “imperfect framework” is better than nothing.

Obama should take lessons on negotiating from the Chinese. China won, in the sense they achieved their objective of stonewalling any meaningful agreement.

The Chinese should take note, as should we all: sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

A new study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program finds that the water melting from Greenland’s ice sheet has increased by 30% over the last decade.

The study estimates that, as a result of the melting, sea levels will rise by 0.5 to 1.5 meters by 2100, threatening coastal cities and flooding island nations. That amount of sea level rise is double that estimated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. The IPCC estimate did not incorporate sea level rise due to the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets.

Lead author Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen said in a press release:

Greenland’s Ice Sheet is the single largest body of freshwater ice in the northern hemisphere. It contains around 3 million km of ice and, if it were to melt completely, this would cause global sea level to rise by roughly 7 meters . . . . Already now we are seeing how the areas experiencing surface melt are expanding northwards and that the periods of melt in southern Greenland are getting longer. The development in the last decade has taken scientists by surprise and it is still uncertain how the ice will react to future climate change.

The Summary – The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) 2009 is available at the AMAP website, as is the full Science Report.

Another new study published in the journal Nature adds further support to the AMAP results. The research team reconstructed the sea levels in the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago, at which time polar temperatures were around 3-5C warmer and equatorial sea-surface temperatures were around 2.5-3.5C warmer than today. The results showed that sea levels around the world during the last interglacial were between 6.6m and 9m higher than today, which implies significant melting of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets.

Even as the AMAP study is being released in Copenhagen, the climate talks, with less than two days to go, are blowing up. Even though the targets on the table are so weak and full of loopholes as to make the proposals meaningless, negotiators have given up on a replacement for Kyoto. The only remaining hope is that they will be able to come to a “politically binding” agreement to serve as a foundation for a legally binding agreement to be negotiated later.

The world’s poorer countries are blaming the world’s rich countries – and capitalism itself – for destroying the world, while rich countries are refusing to change targets that clearly fall short of what’s needed.

George Monbiot at The Guardian writes that the talks at Copenhagen are bigger than climate change – it’s a battle to redefine humanity.

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

And, as the words and stance of the world’s poorer nations show, it’s about fairness. Global warming cannot be addressed without addressing the issue of fairness. Sharon Astyk writes that people will even act against their best interests – even if it means their own destruction – if they perceive they are being treated unfairly:

I think it enormously unlikely that we will respond to climate change as we must. But if we do, it will only happen if people see themselves as part of a story in which the distribution of discomfort and trouble is done fairly, and they are ensured a fair share. Fairness may not be logical, but it is essential.

The “cult of economics” that dominates our political ideology assumes that people always always rational, always act for their own gains, that markets are always efficient, that economics doesn’t have anything to say about equity or fairness – and that nothing is wrong with any of this, ever.

The situation we find ourselves in demands unselfish behavior and acts, toward a common good; which in turn require redefining prosperity and a wholesale reworking of the globe’s economic system, including its its goals and its metrics.

It should be obvious to everybody that an economic system that results in wrecking Earth’s climate and destroying Earth’s ecosystems – squandering humankind’s “natural capital” in pursuit of growth – has failed to produce prosperity. We desperately need another model.

Even as the climate change talks begin today in Copenhagen and as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announces the U.S. will begin regulating greenhouses gases regardless of what the House and Senate do, some are warning: what we are considering doing, won’t be enough.

Consider that economic infrastructure now being installed around the globe is locking in future increases in fossil fuel consumption. Take China, for example.

In 2008, less than nine million cars were sold in China. In 2009, car sales will rise to between 12 and 13 million. By 2015, car sales are expected to reach 16 million – an increase of 44% over 2008 levels. The cumulative increase in cars on the road in China cannot do other than increase future demand for oil, as gasoline and diesel.

At the beginning of 2006, China had an estimated 350 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in operation. An additional 600 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity (net of retirements) is projected to be brought on line in China by 2030 – an increase of 42% over 2006 levels.

Not to pick on China. The U.S. is responsible for 29% of carbon dioxide emissions over past 150 years, triple China’s share. But assigning blame for greenhouse gas emissions is irrelevant to crafting a solution to the climate change crisis.

Even while a new study published in Nature Geoscience (abstract here) reports that over the long term Earth’s temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, the decade of the 2000s will go down as the warmest on record – and climatologists warn warmer weather is on the way.

In a speech to delegates at Copenhagen, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri went down the list of impacts from global warming, some of which we are already beginning to see:

• More heat waves and heavy rainfall events
• Increase in tropical cyclone intensity
• Disappearance of Arctic sea ice
• Decrease in water resources in semi-arid areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa and north-eastern Brazil
• Elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 meters
• Species threatened with extinction
• Greater stress on water resources from population growth and economic and land use change, including urbanization
• Significant future increase in heavy rainfall in many regions, with greater flood risk, while other regions dry up
• More than two billion people will live in areas threatened by flood
• Increasing threat to low-lying island nations and coastal cities and deltas from rising seas Seas are already rising because of melting glaciers and icesheets as well as expansion of the oceans as they warm

The good news may be that the scenarios spun out by the IPCC are fantasies when it comes to potential future fossil fuel consumption. The fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal – simply will not be physically available to generate the greenhouse gas emissions projected in the several IPCC scenarios. Even the IEA, in its recently released World Energy Outlook 2009, is admitting its projections of future energy availability are nothing more than “faith based”, conceding the majority of oil production in 2030 will be coming from “fields yet to be developed or found” and that “output at existing fields . . . will drop by almost two-thirds by 2030.”

The bad news is, the science keeps getting increasingly gloomy. Every new study seems to report that Earth’s climate is more sensitive than previously believed and that “tipping points” are fast approaching, if not already exceeded.

And the good news is pretty dismal, for business-as-usual. If peak production of fossil fuels is near enough to ensure that climate catastrophe will not occur no matter what emissions policies we adopt, that in turn means that our energy policies are hopeless when it comes to transitioning to a social and economic system based on renewable energy resources that in any way resembles the industrial society we have come to think of as normal and desirable.

We cannot avoid the reality that any possible solution to our energy and climate predicament requires that we invent an entirely new economic model, one that doesn’t strive for or depend on economic growth but instead is based on the ecological principle that we must learn to find happiness within limits imposed by the natural systems within which we all live.

Unfortunately, economic growth remains the official ideology at Copenhagen. How to continue on that path is the agenda.