Despite announcing an agreement Durban has failed to achieve its aims.

As with previous summit conferences on climate change Durban has once again highlighted the frustration of countries with emerging economies trying to seek a reasonable agreement with the long established major consuming economies. I believe that the emerging economies do have a strong case. The principal that “the producer pays” is almost always the route used to deal with environmental issues, however in the case of overall global economic and environmental issues this seems to be a rather unfair and unreasonable way of looking at things.

In Europe and the USA it is now quite difficult to find products be it consumer durables, electronics, or day to day necessities that are not made in China or elsewhere in the far East. In the commercial sector this also now goes for business equipment whether it is a laser printer or a machine tool not to mention a light fitting or lamp! Even if such things are branded “Made in the EU” it is inevitable that they contain, probably the majority of components and sub assemblies that come from China, India, Malaysia etc. What is more the raw materials that are used to make these come from other poorer nations for example copper from Sub Saharan Africa.This is largely the result of developed countries effectively exporting dirty , labour intensive and energy consuming production activities to these emerging economies. Is it really appropriate that the developed economies should now demand that costs and technological burdens be placed on the emerging economies just at the point where they are becoming able to develop their internal markets and improve the life styles of their own populations?

It seems that we now need to revise the approach to producer responsibility certainly at the level of Nations. Is this a practical idea? I believe so. It comes back to an issue that I have be looking at for some time, that of “Embodied Energy.” This is the energy required to win materials, form and manufacture products and then store, distribute and .transport them to their final place of use. There is an absolute reluctance of industry and commerce to properly asses this and identify its value. We really should be looking even further than the embodied energy and also factor in other environmental impacts, for example what ecological damage was done to win the raw materials, what proportion of the product can be recovered for re-use through recycling and what impact the remaining fraction will have through its disposal by land fill or incineration. As we are a long way from being able to quantify all these impacts and do not even have a single measure that encompasses all these we need to start with energy alone.

Where we are looking at international trade and global energy use would it not be much more fair and reasonable for the countries that benefit from energy used to manufacture things to take the hit on emissions? This would obviously impact the established economies more than the emerging economies however it would be fair in distributing the pain according to benefit in a much clearer way than crudely looking at the energy use and generation in producing countries?

The real challenge is one of consumption. Finding a way to make the ultimate consumers pay is much more fair and reasonable. Properly worked out this idea will also fairly address the developing consumer societies in developing countries as the burden will fall back on those countries in proportion to the amount of product and embodied energy that will be consumed by the population of those countries.

Kevan Shaw 12-12-11