Members of the United Kingdom Parliament have raised concern about carbon emissions from goods imported and consumed in the UK are rising more quickly than greenhouse gases are being cut domestically. The Energy and Climate Change Committee said that "outsourcing" of pollution to other countries meant the UK's record on cutting greenhouse gases was not as good as official figures suggested, and called on the Government to be open about the issue. The committee said most emissions reductions since 1990 were the result of switching from coal to gas for electricity generation and manufacturing moving abroad to places such as China where goods are made for western markets - and not policies to tackle climate change. A report by the committee warned that while the carbon dioxide emissions generated at home fell by 19% between 1990 and 2008, other Government research shows the UK's "carbon footprint" associated with what the country consumes grew by 20%. The Members of Parliament also said they had seen no evidence that investment decisions by industries that are big electricity users were being influenced by climate policies, which some have claimed will push heavy industry abroad. Committee chairman Tim Yeo said: "Successive governments have claimed to be cutting climate-changing emissions, but in fact a lot of pollution has simply been outsourced overseas. The Department for Energy and Climate Change likes to argue that the UK is only responsible for 2% of the world's CO2 emissions, but the Government's own research shows this not to be the case. The Members of Parliament urged the Government to call on its independent climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, to look at how the UK could count emissions from imported goods in its policies. Mr Yeo also said better information on the emissions "embedded" in the manufacture of products could help consumers and businesses reduce their own carbon footprints.
The implications of research and decisions of this magnitude will have an affect that will hopefully reach far beyond the United Kingdom. All post industrial countries are outsourcing pollution and the sad part is they know it’s happening and fail to report the true data. The false reporting that goes on says that these countries are reducing their pollution emissions. But in reality it’s a very different story. These reports show that these countries are in compliance with their own state laws and global laws that prohibit certain types and amounts of pollution. With the new transparency that the United Kingdom is striving for, it will be a more accurate assessment of how bad the pollution really is. It looks and sounds really good on the surface to say that pollution is decreasing but everything that is consumed by a country is not being counted. With these new measures, countries won’t be allowed to get away with providing false information to the public anymore. The article stated that pollution is down 19% in the UK, which is great news. However with the outsourcing of many industry’s, the richer countries are able to make themselves look better and at the same time exploiting the less fortunate countries who are trying to catch up to the higher status countries such as the UK and America. These smaller, less fortunate countries need to rise up and demand that their resources and land not be destroyed because of competitive costs of production. If this is allowed to keep happening, the pollution issue will only continue to worsen on a global level and the lower status countries will soon be too polluted and depleted of their resources to be a viable option for manufacturing. This would thus cause the post industrial economies to push their pollution on other countries and start the process over. This would all be happening while the rest of the world thinks that they are having an good effect on the global pollution emissions. But in reality they are not. True they are reducing their emission domestically but when their entire carbon footprint is examined, their pollution is only getting worse.
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