The production gap helps reveal how serious many national net zero pledges really are. Australia effectively gets credited for large amounts of carbon stored in forests, which make it look like overall emissions have been falling, even though emissions from burning fossil fuels have been growing for decades. But all this complexity concerning sources and sinks makes it easy for governments and corporations to obfuscate their real contribution to climate change.įor example, countries with lots of uninhabited land, like Australia, have become especially adept at gaming the systems of accounting for net emissions of CO₂.
This is why scientists have a clear picture of how badly off-track the world is with tackling the climate crisis. It's relatively easy to monitor aggregate levels of CO₂ in the global atmosphere. That is why scientists and governments speak of net greenhouse gas emissions: emissions minus removals. These natural removals of carbon are known as sinks. Emissions are produced from ubiquitous sources, but there are also natural systems-especially forests and soil-that suck carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are everywhere, invisible and caused by lots of different processes-from cow digestion to steel production. Nuclear weapons and their production facilities are tangible, chunky and relatively few in number. Unlike some areas of international cooperation, like limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, climate-change summits aim to control something which evades easy calculation. Accordingly, the role that major fossil fuel exporters like Saudi Arabia (oil and natural gas) and Australia (coal and natural gas) play in stoking global heating is not accurately reflected in the talks.
It's hard for experts, let alone the average citizen, to tell fact from fiction.īecause it's only domestic greenhouse gas emissions that are counted for the purpose of the UN climate negotiations, burning exported fossil fuels counts towards the emissions of the importing country. They get to talk up their commitments to a green and clean future without being held to account for their disproportionate role in fuelling the problem. For the leaders of countries and governments that produce fossil fuels, UN climate summits are a public relations boon.
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