GHG Accounting - How To Avoid Emissions From Oil & Gas Your Country Produces Being Counted W. One Weird Trick!!
When the world convenes in the United Arab Emirates later this month for the next round of the endless climate slog, much attention will be paid to the pledges of individual nations to cut their emissions. This has been the basic scorecard of climate talks almost since the start. But it’s a wildly incomplete scorecard, in ways that are becoming ever clearer as we enter the endgame of the energy transition. We’ve been measuring it wrong. That’s because a country’s exports of fossil fuel don’t count against its total. But it’s those exports that are driving fossil fuel expansion around the world, coming as they do from some of the most diplomatically powerful and wealthy nations on Earth.
To give the most obvious, and largest, example: the United States is, fitfully, cutting back on its carbon emissions; its envoys will be able to report, honestly, that the Inflation Reduction Act should soon actually be trimming our domestic use of oil, gas and coal, as we subsidize heat pumps and build out electric-vehicle charging networks. But at the very same moment, the U.S. production of fossil fuels is booming. That means, of course, that much of that supply is headed overseas.
And the numbers are truly staggering. If the liquefied natural gas (LNG) buildout continues as planned, for instance, by 2030 U.S. LNG exports will be responsible for more greenhouse gases than every house, car and factory in the European Union. The emissions, under the United Nations accounting system, will show up on the scorecards of the European Union and the dozens of mostly Asian nations that will buy the gas. But if you could see them in the atmosphere, they would be red, white and blue.
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In Canada, for instance, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau keeps talking a good game on reducing emissions — but at some level, who cares? There aren’t enough Canadians to produce that much carbon (indeed, the wildfires across the nation will produce more than twice as much as the people this year). Canada’s huge contribution to our global crisis is its exports. Trudeau quite honestly summed up his nation’s position in 2017 in a talk to Texas oilmen, when he told the truth about the country’s vast tar sands complex: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Canada couldn’t burn 173 billion barrels of oil if everyone in the country kept their car idling 24 hours a day,and they couldn’t burn the enormous quantity of natural gas that’s been found farther north in Alberta if they all turned their thermostats to 115 degrees (46 C) and wore bathing suits all winter. That’s why they’re busy building pipelines to take the oil and the gas to the Pacific. I could do the same math for Australia or the United Kingdom or Norway. No matter what they stand up and say in the United Arab Emirates over the next month, remember: They’ve decided to hold a fire sale at the end of the world.
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https://thenarwhal.ca/opinion-cop28-oil-gas-exports/