Lemmilicious

Just a little note about the word “model”, in the article it’s used in a way that actually includes the weights, and I think this is the usual way of using it! If you change the weights, you get a different model, though the two models will have the same structure.

Anyway, you make good points!

Yeah, and I really hope we get those carbon tariffs in place despite China’s complaints!

I never meant to say that data does not have value, it definitely tells a country how they could best reduce emissions, like in your example by improving the cleanliness of manufacturing products that are exported.

It does not say how sustainably a specific country is operating (or the EU in this case). If you move manufacture abroad e.g. where it’s made with less clean energy so it emits more, when counting local emissions this still counts as an emission reduction. It doesn’t matter if it’s easier to compute if it’s wrong, and it seems to be entirely the wrong statistic to use for this article.

I don’t know for sure, but I think most products are not usually made in the country they are sold, but I haven’t seen data of proportions. I don’t trust that it’s a decent proxy just because some people gut feeling tells them it is. Data on consumption based emissions exists, and it should be used.

Ahh I’m worried that this might sound better than it actually is, why would anyone not use consumption-based emissions when talking about this? That’s the only way to tell if we’ve actually made the changes necessary to become sustainable or if we’ve just exported enough production abroad to pretend we have. Counting only emissions within the EU is ridiculous.