The Emissions we Sent Somewhere Else

Here is a small piece of dishonesty that, once someone pointed it out to me, I could not un-see.

The rich countries have been claiming, for about thirty years, that they are reducing their emissions. That the air they put into the sky is less bad than it was. That they are, slowly, doing what needs to be done.

This is, in a narrow way, true. The air coming out of the chimneys in Britain, and Germany, and France, and the United States, is less bad than it was.

But the chimneys are not where they used to be.

The factories that made the things the rich countries buy were, one by one, moved to other countries. China, for a long time. Now also Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Mexico. The factories still exist. The air still comes out of the chimneys. But the chimneys are in different countries now, and the emissions get counted against those countries, not against the rich countries that are buying what the factories make.

If you look honestly at what a British person, or a German person, or an American person, actually causes in emissions — including the factories in China that make their phones and their clothes — the emissions have not gone down very much. They have moved.

The rich countries have claimed credit for a move they did not make. The countries where the factories now are have been blamed for emissions that are not really theirs to account for.

The whole international argument about climate has been built on the assumption that the rich countries have been doing their part. They have not, mostly, been doing their part. They have been getting their part done by other people, on other land, and then counting themselves clean.

I am not saying this to blame anyone. The climate does not care which country's accountant wrote the number on which page. It only cares about the air.

The air is not getting better fast enough to matter. This is part of why. The move was an accounting trick, not a solution. An accounting trick that runs for thirty years becomes its own kind of lie.