New Princeton method may help allocate carbon emissions responsibility

Just months before world leaders are scheduled to meet to devise a new international treaty on climate change, a research team led by Princeton University scientists has developed a new way of dividing responsibility for carbon emissions among countries.

…The proposal would use individual emissions as the best, fairest way of calculating a nation’s responsibility to curb its output of carbon dioxide, the authors said. The methodology does not mean that individuals would be singled out, only that these calculations would form the basis of a more equitable formula. Some present strategies that employ averages of energy use in a country are widely regarded as unfair, the authors say, because such efforts mask the emissions of wealthy, high polluters.

“Most of the world’s emissions come disproportionately from the wealthy citizens of the world, irrespective of their nationality,” Chakravarty said, noting that many emissions come from lifestyles that involve airplane flights, car use and the heating and cooling of large homes. “We estimate that in 2008, half of the world’s emissions came from just 700 million people.”

In the new scheme, emission reduction targets for each country are calculated in a multi-step fashion. The researchers used a strong correlation between income and emissions to estimate the emissions of individuals in every country. Next, they combined these factors to see how individual emissions are distributed globally.

EurekAlert