Unpacking the net-zero paradox: how focussing on carbon emissions allows service economies to evade responsibility

Climate, carbon, emissions, and net zero are now widely understood concepts within the media and society more generally. The progress that has been made in raising awareness of the state of our climate over the last ten years is undeniable. People within industrialised societies are more aware now than at any point in history of the impact of their actions on the climate. While this is clear progress, I am going to argue in this article that it is not all positive. The way in which this progress has been achieved, a heavy focus on carbon emissions, has enabled service economies such as the UK to abdicate their responsibility for global emissions. When calculating net-zero targets the entire emphasis is placed on the amount of greenhouse gases created when producing goods, with little to no consideration for where these will then be consumed. Despite not affecting the calculation of global emissions, this is an important distinction if we are to combat the idea that the actions of  countries such as the UK, which is a service economy and therefore domestically produces just 0.793% of global GHG emissions, have little to no impact on global climate trends, when countries such as China are producing 29.2% of global GHG emissions (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, 2023). 

In order to understand this argument better it is important to give it some brief historical context. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries mass industry was focused in what we know as the global ‘West’. Europe and the US would be the first to industrialise and would grow into the major industrialised regions in the world, producing a significant proportion of the world’s manufactured goods. However, technological innovations of the 20th-century, primarily the invention of the shipping container in 1956 would fundamentally buck this trend (Nagurney, 2022). Costs of shipping goods around the world would dramatically fall over the preceding years, removing the barrier that had existed to cheap labour abroad. Real US shipping costs per ton of cargo would decrease by ⅔ between 1950 and 2000 (Busse, 2003) This would lead to a fundamental decline of what is often referred to as mass-industry in the “west”, most prominently in Europe. What industry did remain was on the whole high-tech or luxury goods. While mass-industry faltered, consumption would only continue to grow as countries, particularly in Asia and most famously China, would at the same time rapidly industrialise and expand their economies.

This shift represented not just the export of mass-industry but also the export of the corresponding emissions abroad. Industry in China makes up a significant portion of their GHG emissions. 36% of China’s total emissions come from the production of power, for direct use in the industrial sector (International Energy Agency, 2023). This is an industry that, although certainly catering to an increasingly wealthy domestic market, is in large part manufacturing goods for consumption abroad. China is by far the world’s largest exporter with 95% of these exports being manufactured goods (Lardy and Huang, 2020). We are complicit in the emissions created to satisfy our consumption. Of course, it is still essential that China improves the environmental sustainability of its economy. It is by far the world’s biggest emitter of GHGs, more than double the next biggest, the US. However, we need to also start thinking much more about what we consume and the effect that producing these goods has on our planet. Countries cannot continue to entirely pin the blame for emissions on countries such as China, while they continue to consume goods created within these economies. There is no easy solution to this problem when the global economy is so tied up within networks of manufacturing and trade. However, there needs to be a concerted effort to put pressure on consumers to ethically consume and stop wiping their hands clean of the role they play within global manufacturing. Just to be very clear, this is not written as an excuse to be used by producers, but a call for a more universal response that is adequate to both the shared responsibility and the nature of the climate emergency that we are facing.

L.Fenner@sms.ed.ac.uk

Bibliography

Busse, Matthias. “Tariffs, Transport Costs and the WTO Doha Round: The Case of Developing Countries.” Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2003, pp. 15–31, https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.23818. Accessed 18 May 2023.

Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. GHG Emissions of All World Countries. European Commission, 2023.

            International Energy Agency. An Energy Sector Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality in China. International Energy Agency, 2022.

Lardy, Nicholas, and Tinalei Huang. “Weak Exports Will Not Stall China’s Manufacturing Recovery.” Peterson Institute for International Affairs, 2020.

            Nagurney, Anna. “A Brief History of the Shipping Container.” The Maritime Executive, 30 Sep. 2021, maritime-executive.com/editorials/a-brief-history-of-the-shipping-container.