So I researched this a bit. Accounts vary on this.
The RCG source I linked above puts China's territorial CO2 emissions at around 14 gigatons and China's consumption based emissions (accounting for place of consumption) at around 13 gigatons. So that's not actually a particularly significant adjustment.
The Global Carbon Project also attempts to quantify this. They put China as a net exporter of CO2 to the order of 0.7 tons of CO2 per capita in 2018. Compared to this Western European countries imported around 1-2 tons of CO2 per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). According to Global Carbon Project estimates China's 2018 CO2 consumption was similar to that of France or Spain. Of course since 2018 China's economy and CO2 emissions have continued to grow.
So to summarize even adjusting for place of consumption China's CO2 emissions are at best broadly similar to those of Western Europe and certainly not 5x lower as originally implied. That said the US is definitely a worse emitter per-capita.
That aside I think the problem of consumption based emissions accounting is that it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. For example if China chooses to burn dirty coal so that it can provide cheap energy to increase the competitiveness of its exporters that's okay, it's the fault of the countries taking those exports not China.
Wonder how much of this is Chinese emissions being construction driven, especially on "new" stuff developed west gets to hide into historical emissiond data. This is the same in most developing countries who need to build on massive scale for the first time if they want to be uplifted from outdated building stock. More so in Asia lacking in renewable construction materials like wood. So we get stats like China using more concrete in a few years than US in last century. PRC is still at 60% urbanization rate. Even accounting for ghost city memes and 60M+ empty apartments, that's still ~300M dwelling units and infrastructure short for 80% urbanization goal in next 50 years. Unless there's significant building material improvements, China and many other countries still has a lot of emissions to "catch up". And for the purpose of development and alleviating poverty, the faster the better.
>it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries.
That's another consideration that seperates PRC, who is actually competent at expediently building massively, both politically and industrially. A capability many countries lack. Majority of countries are unable adopt emission heavy policies even if they wanted to. Would be interesting to see projected US emissions if they could actually pursue uncompromised infrastructure plan. Something like total emission of plan since it'll likely be stretched over much longer period due to how slow US builds. Or what was Europe / Japan / Korea's per capita emission rebuilding the country post war which is akin the the breadth and speed of developement in China.
Those statistics are very incomplete, as they don't measure the emissions connected to the whole lifecycle of products, but rather seem to track only a weighted average of production based emissions (which appears to be their definition of consumption based emissions).
In order to get a realistic measure, we need to keep track of the whole product lifecycle, from gathering materials and production, to lifetime usage, waste disposal and reabsorption into the earth and atmosphere. This multiplies the total sum of emissions many times over, and heavily disfavours high-consuming per capita countries.
If we compare household consumption rates, China is emitting only a fraction of that of western households. In terms of money spent, consumption per capita of the US is about 6-7 times larger than that of China.
The statistics I posted make a reasonable attempt to quantify consumption based emissions. If you have a better source I’d be interested in seeing it.
Just stating dollar based household consumption values seems like a very poor proxy though. It assumes each dollar of consumption is equally emissions intensive and ignores non-household consumption.
More fundamentally though shifting accounting for emissions to place of consumption absolves China of responsibility for its own industrial development choices.
China is free to have lose (or laxly enforced) emissions standards to make its industry more competitive. For example China’s free to produce huge amounts of steel in inefficient blast furnaces instead of using more efficient, more expensive methods.
According to consumption accounting all the responsibility for those emissions falls on the countries consuming those goods, even if they might not have ever wanted their industry to be undercut by cheap imports. It assumes that all the benefits of the CO2 emissions accumulate with the country consuming the goods, not the country producing the goods.
According to the most obvious metric (territorial emissions) China’s per capita are significantly higher than Europe but trail those of the US.
Such data, when generally available, will give us a better picture of the overall global situation.
> Just stating dollar based household consumption values seems like a very poor proxy though
I think it is, actually. Western citizens and US citizens in particular does not only have a much higher expenditure of consumer goods, the goods they prefer have higher emissions connected to them also.
Here is a report from 2015 about Germany's average household emissions:
“In the years when HCEs were first reported (1995 in China, 1990 in Canada and 1997 in UK), per person HCEs in China, Canada and the UK were 0.54 tCO2, 13.54 tCO2 and 9.63 tCO2, respectively. These values had changed to 1.77 tCO2, 13.14 tCO2, 8.20 tCO2 by the end of reporting (2011 in China and UK and 2007 in Canada),”
As you can see, such analyses paints a very different picture, one where western households appears to be the main driver of global emissions. And thus the focus on production based emissions is largely a red herring, due to the fact that China has to catch up in infrastructure. The emissions tied to western infrastructure have already been emitted.
In essence, China has become the scapegoat of the guilty conscience of the west, who will twist the data in such a way to paint themselves in the most flattering light they can, and China in the worst possible way.
> It assumes that all the benefits of the CO2 emissions accumulate with the country consuming the goods, not the country producing the goods.
All countries have a responsibility for decreasing emissions tied to the production of goods, but all goods are essentially produced for the global market and as such is driven by global demand. Hence consumption is the most important measure when delivering blame. Moreover, if hypothetically western Europe had been forced to produce the goods that China produces (per capita) and vice versa, the emissions tied to European production would rapidly increase, and the production of them would naturally become much dirtier as well due to the limited amount of green energy and cheapness of dirty sources of electricity. So delivering the blame on countries for the production of goods assumes the impossible alternative scenario where the west hypothetically could do a lot better in terms of production. It’s not clear that they could.
The figure of 1.5 tonnes you gave for China only looks at direct household energy consumption sources (I.e fuel, heating and electricity). It’s not at all comparable to the German paper.
The figure of 1.7 tonnes is only for household consumption figures from 2011. China’s economy (and emissions) has grown enormously in the last 10 years.
These aren’t fair comparisons based on recent data, and they only look at household consumption.
And I’d maintain that China bares responsibility for its industrial development and energy mix choices. No one has forced those choices on China. China has pursued those policies with the aim of increasing export competitiveness, often at the cost of manufactures in western nations.
We don't have exact data for the entire product life cycle emissions, but the data I provided give some indications of the difference in scale. What we can see is that
1) Household emissions represent the largest share of global emissions
2) Household emissions are very roughly proportional to expenditure
So while we don't have exact numbers, the 1/5'th estimate is actually roughly on the spot given the disparity in household consumption. I'll also just reiterate my point that temporarily building infrastructure in order to catch up with western countries is not blameworthy in itself. While the production has much room for improval in terms of emissions, it is wrong to blame China for the emissions simply for existing.
At any rate, the narrative that China is the most blameworthy actor falls flat on its face. The take-away should be that, as the German paper mentions, that we must drastically reduce household emissions in order to reach our climate goals.
Instead, the debate is mostly political and one-sided, where the ideal (i.e. most convenient) goal for western policy makers appears to be to put an end to or hamper China's infrastructure projects which are crucial to the welfare of the Chinese people, and by extension, the peoples of other nations affected by the Belt and Road initiative. To me, it suspiciously looks like the climate debate in the media has been to some degree hijacked by forces that seeks to undermine China's Belt and Road initiative.
The RCG source I linked above puts China's territorial CO2 emissions at around 14 gigatons and China's consumption based emissions (accounting for place of consumption) at around 13 gigatons. So that's not actually a particularly significant adjustment.
The Global Carbon Project also attempts to quantify this. They put China as a net exporter of CO2 to the order of 0.7 tons of CO2 per capita in 2018. Compared to this Western European countries imported around 1-2 tons of CO2 per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2). According to Global Carbon Project estimates China's 2018 CO2 consumption was similar to that of France or Spain. Of course since 2018 China's economy and CO2 emissions have continued to grow.
So to summarize even adjusting for place of consumption China's CO2 emissions are at best broadly similar to those of Western Europe and certainly not 5x lower as originally implied. That said the US is definitely a worse emitter per-capita.
That aside I think the problem of consumption based emissions accounting is that it ignores the impact of different industrial development choices made by different countries. For example if China chooses to burn dirty coal so that it can provide cheap energy to increase the competitiveness of its exporters that's okay, it's the fault of the countries taking those exports not China.