According to Les Républicains MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, France is less responsible for global warming than China. According to him, no matter how hard Paris tries to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, it will not change much as long as Beijing continues to emit so many. “Since 1990, France has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. China has tripled them”he says. “So the subject is in globalization, and in the rebalancing of globalization.”
In reality, this statement lacks a lot of context. First, what is true are the numbers. They come from an independent American firm: Rhodium Group. Every year, this firm publishes a report on greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and in its latest report, the firm observes that in 30 years, China has multiplied its greenhouse gas emissions squeeze in threes. Just before the health crisis, it was even the first carbon emitter in the world with almost a third of the emissions on its own. Except that this report does not take into account a very important factor: what are called “imported emissions”.
These are the greenhouse gas emissions related to the goods a country imports, like the smartphone you have in your pocket. There is a good chance that it was produced outside France and even outside Europe, in China in particular. If we consider imported emissions, France produces a little less than 5 tonnes of carbon equivalent per inhabitant. In China, it is less than 2 tons. This is what we find in the latest report of the High Council for the Climate.
This report observes that imported emissions weigh increasingly heavily on a country’s carbon footprint. Since 1995, their share has increased by 78% so that today, more than half of France’s greenhouse gas emissions (53% exactly) are due to its imports. In other words, if we count the imported emissions in France’s carbon footprint, the score would be much higher!
Not to mention, as the firm Rhodium Group explains, that a country like China only became one of the main causes of global warming very recently: in the 1960s. Still according to him, developed countries like China France has been emitting greenhouse gases since the 18th century. Today’s global warming is therefore rather linked to our past activity.