Forcing the rich to deplane and de-carbon
So, COP-26 is nearly over and we can all stop worrying about the impending heat death of the planet for another year. Various countries have promised to do even more than they were already not doing, while U.S. congresspeople will presumably veto whatever inadequate measures Joe Biden signs up to anyway, because preventing the destruction of the planet will cost some of their constituents money. It’s been an exhausting few weeks, so hopefully, all of the fossil fuel lobbyists will be given a nice holiday after all of their exertions making sure nothing substantive gets done.
Yesterday I was chatting with a friend who’s employed by a company trying to calculate the carbon footprints of supply chains (this, it turns out, is COMPLICATED), and he was explaining how hard it is to pin particular emissions to particular countries. If Canada buys American cars made from Chinese steel made from Australian iron ore, who’s to blame for the carbon dioxide?
So, I wondered, does it make sense to think about emissions on a per-country basis anyway. Within countries different citizens emit wildly differing amounts of greenhouse gases, so why should they invariably be addressed together? For example: my great-uncle is British, as is Richard Branson. My great-uncle hasn’t left his small town in West Wales in a decade; Richard Branson runs an airline, owns a tax haven; and recently went on an utterly pointless round-trip into space. Are they really equally to blame for the 550 million tonnes of CO2 emitted by Britain each year?
Fortunately, I’m not the only person who’s been thinking about this.