Every COP produces a "landmark pledge" and every year global emissions go up anyway. I'll believe it when there's an actual enforcement mechanism with teeth, not before.
The Guardian - Breaking news, sport, US, world, entertainment and lifestyle
Genuine question, not being snarky — how do you even calculate embedded carbon for finished goods with global, multi-country supply chains? Feels close to impossible to audit properly.
Not impossible but it's ugly — default emissions-intensity benchmarks per product/country pairing, with self-reporting for anyone who wants to prove they beat the default. It's basically how CBAM does it today. Gameable at the margins but auditable in aggregate.
I've now lived through six of these summits being called "the last chance." Forgive me for not popping champagne this time.
A carbon border tax is the only mechanism that actually stops emissions being outsourced to countries with looser rules. This should have happened a decade ago.
Agreed in principle, though the implementation risk is real — exporters in countries that had nothing to do with historical emissions could get hit hardest if there's no carve-out for development status.
Or, alternative read: this is protectionism with a green coat of paint. Rich countries get to keep their industries competitive by taxing everyone else's exports and calling it climate policy.
Border carbon taxes are industrial policy with better PR. Ask any economist what happens to compliance costs on imported goods — they get passed straight to consumers.
The EU's CBAM is already running and the price pass-through so far has been much smaller than the doom forecasts predicted. Worth looking at actual data instead of the theory here.
Notice the coverage always leads with the pledge headline and buries, in like paragraph 14, that last year's pledges from the same summit were quietly abandoned.
This is the actual story every year and it never gets the headline. The 2023 methane pledge is a good example — quietly missing every interim target and nobody's following up on it.