I’m not sure what the best approach to this issue is. Accounting for consumption would be more complex than direct emissions, my recollection is that a matrix may need to be inverted and trade data would be needed. Would this be consistent with accounting for historical emissions?

An underlying issue is that emissions are generally associated with either basic needs, infrastructure or consumption. If emissions reductions from major developing emitters were conditional on millennium development goals being achieved or something similar, huge amounts of progress could be made.

China rightly argues that much of its emissions are virtual US and European because of remote production. They want to see the West take part responsibility for some portion of these.

This will be a big bone of contention at Copenhagen.

Stern breaks the east-west deadlock on who’s responsible for CO2
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ georgemonbiot/ 2009/ may/ 27/ monbiot-stern-east-west-deadlock-co2

China says it’s unfair that the west ‘outsources’ emissions. Now that Lord Stern has said responsibility should be split between producers and consumers, other countries may follow suit

…greenhouse gases produced in one nation on behalf of another. The UK, for example, is comfortably meeting its commitments under the Kyoto protocol only because much of our manufacturing industry has moved to China. Under Kyoto rules, the pollution produced by Chinese factories making goods for the UK belongs to China. The protocol counts only the production, not the consumption, of greenhouse gases.

China says this is unfair. Around half the recent increase in its emissions arises from the manufacture of goods for western markets.
This pollution should, it says, belong to the consumer nations, not the producers. A successor to the Kyoto protocol which did not recognise this would punish China for our consumption.

I do not agree that US emissions reductions of 77 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 is consistent with “what is needed by the international community as a whole to contain the increase of average global temperatures to the catastrophe-averting limit of 2°C”. If the US reduced its emissions by 77% by 2050, then its per-capita emissions would be 3.17 tonnes (assuming a 2050 population of 403.9 million). For this to be consistent with international reductions, global per-capita emissions would also be 3.17 tonnes. This results in global emissions of 29 Gt CO2-e.

The model from Meinshausen et al.’s recent paper in Nature can then be used to convert this into a probability of exceeding 2 degrees of warming. They have a spreadsheet that is part of supporting online material that does this. this gives a likelihood range of 28-69% of exceeding 2 degrees. This is too high a probability of exceeding 2 degrees. I would not hop on a plane if there was a 28-69% chance of crashing.

If the US cannot get enough emission reductions through congress then it needs to find a way to do much more financing of emission reductions in developing countries. China is not impressed with what has been proposed so far. Professor Jiahua Pan, from a prominent Chinese think tank, was not impressed, according to a recent interview:

“China is not at all impressed with Obama,” Professor Pan told the Herald. “Obama’s statements are certainly insufficient and his demands for developing countries are unrealistic.”

http://www.google.com/ hostednews/ canadianpress/ article/ ALeqM5gv6_XtjI8HwmrAwMAv6QEfi0HoGw

It makes one wince in embarrasement.