Are China’s Carbon Emissions China’s?

Climate Progress: The United States and other nations that trade heavily with China are indirectly responsible for nearly a quarter of China’s carbon emissions, according to a briefing note issued late Friday by the U.K.’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Last week, we wrote about a new study showing that global carbon emissions in 2006 were 35 percent above the 1990 baseline set down in the Kyoto Protocol. For some time, head-scratching over a successor treaty to Kyoto has occupied climate scientists and economists. This task is becoming much more difficult as it becomes clear that carbon-emissions trends may not belong to individual nations at all, but the fluid trade systems that weave them together. “[Research] suggests that a focus on emissions within national borders may miss the point,” the Tyndall authors write.