November 2011Among countries, China recently has become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. This milestone was reached at an astonishingly rapid pace. The drivers of China’s emissions explosion are obvious, but the policies for dealing with it are more complicated than one might assume. International manufacturing and trade has turned China into the world’s factory. This raises the question, “How much of China’s carbon emissions are exported in the form of the manufactured products to be sold in developed countries?” Researchers at the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) at Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and Tsinghua University recently published a study that aims to answer this question. One of their findings is that in 2008, 48% of China's carbon emissions were in the form of exported goods.
Take a look at the abstract for more details: ScienceDirect
Xu, M.; Li, R.; Crittenden, J. C.; Chen, Y.-S. CO2 emissions embodied in China's exports from 2002 to 2008: a structural decomposition analysis. Energy Policy 2011, 39 (11), 7381-7388.
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