> a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita.
While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them.
I wonder. Is it possible to extrapolate emissions based on imports in a meaningful way?
Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions?
Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with.
You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.
While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.