Blaming Britain

The UK can seem like a progressive voice on climate change, having committed itself to a 68% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 against 1990 levels.

The first problem is that the government has no serious plans to meet those targets. The second is that they count Britain's responsibility in the narrowest possible way.

Indeed, the UK is arguably more to blame for the climate crisis than any other country.

For his 2011 book 'The No Nonsense Guide to Climate Change', the researcher Danny Chivers dug back through historic emissions data and compared them to current population levels. Between 1850 and 2007, he found, the UK was responsible for more CO2 from fossil fuels per person than any other major country. The only country with a higher historic per-person carbon footprint was Luxembourg.

A decade on, Chivers re-ran the numbers for me. "Every UK resident is sitting on around 1,200 tonnes of historical CO2, making us one of the most historically polluting countries per person in the world," he said. Out of countries responsible for more than 1 percent of emissions, "We're jostling for the top spot on the historic responsibility table with a similar per capita figure as the US, compared with 150 historic tonnes per person for China, and 40 tonnes per person for India."

The infrastructure and relative wealth we enjoy in the UK has been built on huge amounts of past pollution – much of which is still in the atmosphere today.

These figures only account for emissions rising up from the UK's land mass. If a British company designs a product in the UK, sells it in the UK and counts its profits in the UK, but offshores its manufacture to Vietnam, then its emissions are counted in Vietnam. And because the UK is one of the world's most de-industrialised countries, this offshoring of emissions means that Britain undercounts its carbon footprint more than most other countries.

A report for WWF last year, for example, argued that around half – 46 percent – of the UK's emissions come from products made overseas to satisfy demand in the UK.

The UK's responsibility is also about history. Britain developed the form of coal-powered industrial capitalism at the heart of this crisis and, through its empire, exported it around the world. When European colonists arrived in Africa, Australasia, the Americas and Asia, they drove deforestation, plunder and pollution, often replacing civilisations which had long survived relatively sustainably, and establishing machinery that continues to extract wealth to this day.

Excerpted: ‘COP26: Industrial Capitalism and How the UK Started the Climate Crisis’

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