Fred's Footprint: My ancestral carbon footprint
The famed US climate scientist Jim Hansen of NASA has been circulating to friends and contacts a draft of a letter he plans to send to UK prime minister Gordon Brown. The main thrust of the letter is to criticise plans for a new coal-fired power station in the country that invented the practice of making energy from burning fossilised carbon.
But along the way, Hansen points out something I didn't know. Per head of its current population, the UK is responsible for more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other nation.
How come? After all, our current per-capita emissions are only half those in the US, Canada and some of the more profligate Gulf states – and about level with Germany, Japan and Russia.
The trouble is that us Brits – whose dogged desire to mine coal and burn it to power dark satanic mills kick-started the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago – have been at the business of filling the atmosphere with CO2 longer than anyone else. And, as we have all been told countless times, once the dreaded greenhouse gas gets into the air, it sticks around – often for centuries.
The fumes from those satanic mills are still up there, warming the world. Hansen says that if you share out those accumulated emissions among the current British population of about 60 million, it works out at almost 1200 tonnes per head.
So me and my dad, and his dad and his dad, and so on back through the generations, have been responsible for more CO2 emissions than a similar family tree of Americans (just under 1100 tonnes per head), Germans (950 tonnes), Canadians (740 tonnes), Japanese (370 tonnes), and so on.
Ministers here in the UK are fond of pointing out that Brits are only responsible for 2% of current global CO2 emissions. Maybe so. But Brits are, says Hansen, responsible for 6% of the accumulated CO2 released into the air by human activity. Not exactly a shining example from a country with less than 1% of the world's population.
If there were a fair system of atmospheric justice, time would long since have been called on our emissions. The cry would be "leave some room for the Chinese". But there isn't. So we assuage our guilt by blaming the Chinese for emissions they haven't even made yet.
Since you asked, Chinese per-capita emissions today are about half those of Brits. And from Hansen's historical perspective, the accumulated emissions from each inhabitant of the new workshop of the world are something like one-sixteenth of those from the old workshop of the world.
None of this says developing countries won't have to start controlling the rapid growth in their emissions – for the good of us all. And last week at the climate conference in Bali we saw clear signs that they are waking up to that responsibility.
But it does underline where the real responsibility for climate change thus far lies. Step forward me and my collier ancestors from the Black Country of the English Midlands.
Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent
newscientist.com |
