Britain’s climate change cover-up – Metro.co.uk – British companies have been caught lying about the pollution levels from their plants, since they conveniently omit the pollution levels from their companies located overseas.
Britain creates 200million extra tonnes of greenhouse gases which it is not declaring, campaigners claim.
It actually produces up to 15 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide rather than just the two per cent which the Government admits to.
The gap is mainly down to companies failing to declare the emissions of their factories abroad, says a report from Christian Aid.
This reminds me of a personal situation where a very large food manufacturer (in Latin America) requested an industrial equipment with a burner that met most stringent levels of pollution controls; the U.S. manufacturer told me that it wasn’t necessary to sell that burner to them since local laws didn’t require them to have it. Guess which burner they ended up buying.
How shocking, corporations trying to look good on paper while they actually have very little social conscience.
No social conscience.
I stand corrected then 🙁
i’ve long since given up expecting any kind of rational or informed scientific knowledge in this debate … but was at least hoping for some basic arithmetic to survive the anti-capital shrieking.
if you choose to divide emissions by nation, then that’s how you do it – you can’t go back and try to double-count oversea subsidaries … what about local subcontracors of overseas subsidaries, or additional carbon burnt at home by overseas employees. do we count the emissions generated by them travelling to work in the morning? (and charge it back to the UK and US)
you count it once and once only, anything else is ridiculous, illogical and only meant to obfuscate the true data. the motivation for reducing accuracy would escape most observers, well unless of course you were an NGO, with another press-release burning a hole in your pocket, desperate for more carbon-FUD and blind, unquestiong coverage of a pointless non-story.
#2
Many years ago, while taking Economics 1 in college, our professor described how there is a supply and demand for pollution. Society’s demands lean towards perfectly clean emissions and business’ lean towards not having any controls at all. At some point, equilibrium is met where businesses can afford the restrictions.
If businesses can be pollutant free *and maximize profits* they will do so. Many environmentalists have provided avenues where businesses can lower costs by being more efficient on certain types of emissions. However, never forget that businesses are competing against one another. If one business can get a benefit by claiming they are cleaner than a competitor by leveraging a legal loophole they will. It is no different than claiming a deduction on your tax form so that you avoid a penalty. It is not an issue of “social conscience” it is an issue of competition. “Social conscience” means different things to different people at different times. I suppose providing employment to people or producing needed products at lower prices is not “socially conscious”?
#4
Be mindful of the law of unintended consequences. If the rule is, “wherever the polluting factory is located, it counts against that country’s pollution count” and it is the case that companies in the UK are punished for being polluters, then it will encourage businesses to move polluting production overseas to a country where there is little or no punishment for pollution. You could end up with a Fortune 500 company whose production is very polluting with a claimed zero pollution count because all production is overseas.
First question would be – are the overseas emissions being reported overseas already? If so, arch is right, at least about it being improper to double-report emissions.
Gotta say giving up “expecting any kind of rational or informed scientific knowledge in this debate” seems a bit hyperbolic, aside from the logical problems inherent in notions of scientific knowledge being rational or informed. As (I think) WokTiny once put it –
Wait. Huh?
Wait… so in fact Britain is just 2% – but British companies contribute more… correct?
Well that’s how I read the pollution figures anyhow – It’s not the UK Governments job to regulate pollution in other countries. Even if it is by British companies.
For example – a US Oil Firm polluting in India.. well that sucks, but I wouldn’t expect the US Government to control pollution in India either.