Here are the latest greenhouse gas (GHG=CO2e) figures for the UK from the Office of National Statistics.
Lulu (Land Use, and Land Use Change and Forestry) pumps O2 into the atmosphere. Below, the above UK info vis-à-vis Europe et la belle France:
Transport, power stations, business & residential, other energy, industrial processes (in that order) cause the most GHGs in the UK.
While UK per capita GDP is growing, the manufacturing economy has decreased slightly and the service sector developed strongly1 territorial based emissions line.. Consumption is normally the largest component of GDP.
The service sector development has, as it were, pushed manufacturing/GHG production processes offshore. The UK in 2017 is the 10th largest global exporter and the 5th largest importer!
And what does the UK balance of payments for manufactured/GHG products per capita look like, in comparison to four other large trading nations: USA, PRC, Russia, Japan, India?
Prosperity is a primary driver of carbon dioxide emissions, but clearly policy and technological choices make a difference.
Of the greenhouse gases still produced in the UK, the largest is carbon dioxide whose sources are both natural and human. Natural sources include decomposition, ocean release and respiration. Human sources come from activities like the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
The UK’s carbon dioxide emissions are not far from the global average 4.8 in 2017: 5.8t per person (Portugal 5.3 tonnes; 5.5t in France). The choice of energy sources plays a key role: in the UK, Portugal and France, a much higher share of electricity is produced from nuclear and renewable sources–thus a much lower share of electricity is produced from fossil fuels (in 2015, only 6% of France’s electricity came from fossil fuels, compared to 55% in Germany).
So, given the UK’s
- GHG-emission efficiencies that have been achieved through better technology leading to reductions in industrial and business energy use, reduced electricity use, increased use of renewable energy and the replacement of coal with gas;
- increasing GDP through the service sector rather than by increasing manufacturing; and
- rising trade deficit, by our importing more and more goods;
we can conclude that there’s still a lot of carbon reducing work to be done. The past few decades have seen a dramatic rise in exports of (a) goods from other countries such as China, which has a very coal-intensive electricity generation mix. Couple this with the fact that UK efficiency measures have mostly emphasised residential/manufacturing and business energy solutions rather than (b) transport and (c) farming GHG-emission issues. It is these three major areas that will have an important impact on average UK consumer life-styles.
‘Imported’ GHG-emissions have increased over the past two decades, so that they now make up around half of the UK’s Climate Footprint, as table3 above shows. The UK’s production GHG-emissions have fallen fast, but alas imports have offset much of that gain—imports in the following areas:
It’s important to note that the chart counts mobile phone contracts that come with a phone as a service, along with the whole public sector and food bought in restaurants. Any emissions produced while providing these to the end user are counted as services.
The UK’s reliance on imported GHG-emissions is relatively unusual, however. Most countries import only 10 or 15% of their carbon footprints. This situation is less a case of outsourcing factories overseas and more of our consuming lots more from the globalised world (a sort of reversed British Empire effect). UK manufacturing hasn’t decreased that much, but imports fuelled by cheaper labour have met the growing demand.
As mentioned in the FAQ about why PET has lots of non-UK offset projects, it is extremely important for the Findhorn Ecovillage Community, Scotland, the UK and the world to figure out how to decouple the necessary economic development and GHG-emissions. Now here’s a personal and community challenge!