{"id":60408,"date":"2021-11-13T07:47:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-13T12:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60408"},"modified":"2021-11-13T07:47:09","modified_gmt":"2021-11-13T12:47:09","slug":"separating-the-self-flagellation-from-the-greenhouse-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60408","title":{"rendered":"Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Speaking\u00a0to the media<\/a>\u00a0at the Youth4Climate event last week, Greta Thunberg berated the UK for continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea while pretending to be green ahead of the coming COP26 conference.\u00a0 Not only that, but as the originator of the industrial revolution, Britain is doubly guilty:<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, the climate crisis \u2026 more or less it started in the UK since that\u2019s where the industrial revolution started, we started to burn coal there, so of course the UK has an enormous historical responsibility when it comes to historic emissions since the climate crisis is a cumulative crisis.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s an interesting question that Greta has probably never had to answer, and which many of my readers will probably get wrong.\u00a0 If we add up all of the carbon dioxide emitted by households, businesses and industries within the boundaries of what we now call the United Kingdom, when will China \u2013 currently the world\u2019s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide \u2013 overtake?\u00a0 2025?\u00a0 2035?\u00a0 2050?<\/p>\n

No, in fact, China overtook the UK in\u00a0cumulative<\/em>\u00a0carbon dioxide emissions two\u00a0decades<\/em>\u00a0ago in 2002:<\/p>\n

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The reason for this is that China\u2019s march to industrialisation following its admission to the World Trade Organisation, arrived just at the point when the world\u2019s\u00a0conventional<\/em>\u00a0oil deposits were beginning to deplete.\u00a0 Moreover, by December 2001, while oil was still in demand, most of the developed states had made deep cuts to their coal use.\u00a0 This gave China access both to its own deposits and to cheap deposits from around the world.\u00a0 But coal is a particularly heavy emitter of carbon dioxide, and China\u2019s emissions from coal had already passed those of the UK \u2013 for the last time \u2013 in 1968:<\/p>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas Speaking\u00a0to the media\u00a0at the Youth4Climate event last week, Greta Thunberg berated the UK for continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea while pretending to be green ahead of the coming COP26 conference.\u00a0 Not only that, but as the originator of the industrial revolution, Britain is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[140,386,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-60408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate","tag-greenhouse-gases","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60409,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60408\/revisions\/60409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}