A new report from the UK government boasts of a claim to have cut its national carbon emissions by more than half over the past 50 years. Data compiled by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) claims to show that Britain’s emissions have dropped by 52% since their peak in 1970.
This set senior British Conservative Party officials boasting, led by Claire Coutinho, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (yes, that’s her actual title). “Britain is the first country in the G20 to halve its carbon emissions,” Coutinho bragged. “We are world leaders in tackling climate change.”
Coutinho’s comment echoed specious claims made last September by Prime Minister Rish Sunak, who said in a speech, “[W]e’re so far ahead of every other country in the world. We’ve had the fastest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the G7. Down almost 50% since 1990. France? 22%. The US? No change at all. China? Up by over 300%.” The truth, of course, is that the US has cut its own emissions over the past 15 years to levels roughly equivalent to its emissions in 1992; but hey, when it comes to crass politics, who’s really counting, anyway?
But counting is important and, for the UK, the legitimacy of all this virtue signaling about emissions depends entirely on how the counting is done. Writing at The Telegraph, Jonathan Leake points out that the method deployed by the GCP counts only what are known as “territorial” emissions from domestic production. Leake correctly notes this method fails to include emissions from “all foreign-produced cars, clothes, food and every other import as well as the shipping that imports those goods into the UK, and most of the aviation fuel burned for passenger flights.”
Oh.
So, what does that mean? Well, it means that if you count up all the non-territorial emissions coming out of the UK, you have to tack on an extra 350-400 metric tons to the 417MT counted by the GCP, which causes you to wind up right back at around 800MT, which is essentially where the UK’s emissions stood 50 years ago.
You can’t make this stuff up, you really can’t.
Britain’s reality is pretty much the same as Germany’s reality when it comes to reducing its national emissions footprint: The gains that have been made have happened mainly because of insanely high electricity prices caused by absurd government policy decisions that have forced heavy industries to shutter their domestic factories and relocate them to China and other countries. These two former industrial giants of Europe have only been able to achieve nominal emissions reductions via deindustrialization.
At the end of the day, what good has that carbon accounting canard done for humanity, given that we only have a single atmosphere to share? Do emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases matter less because they now take place in Singapore or South Korea rather than in Scotland or Wales? This kind of virtue signaling nonsense is the central fraud of the whole climate alarm movement.
Joe Biden engaged in the same fraud when he cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office based on the fraudulent claim that doing so would reduce US emissions from the import of heavy oil sands crude from Canada. But the Canadian oil has continued to move into the US, only instead of coming in on a modern, extremely efficient and safe pipeline, it comes in on higher-emitting trucks and trains, or via older, less-efficient pipelines. The truth is exactly the opposite of the claim.
The White House resorted to a similar false claim in issuing its bizarre pause in permitting of US LNG export facilities, a move that will inevitably result in a rise in LNG exports from nations, like Qatar, Algeria and Senegal, which have far lower environmental standards than the US. Do emissions from those other countries somehow matter less on a global basis since they don’t originate in America?
It’s all so utterly cynical and absurd, but this is what we in the western world have come to be now, all in the name of the religion of climate alarm.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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