Climate Change Cannot Be Dealt with by Restricting World Trade

Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) believe that imposing restrictions on world trade will have little impact on climate change.

The researchers have identified other factors that have contributed to the marked disproportion between exporters and importers of emission. One important factor is the deficit in current account of the United States.

Previous research on climate change has shown that increase in world trade activities is the chief reason for transfer of carbon dioxide emissions from country to country. This is because the energy utilized for producing the traded goods imparts carbon dioxide to the goods. According to PIK researcher Michael Jakob, it is difficult to determine if the exporting or importing country is to be held responsible for the emissions. He stated that the outsourcing of carbon dioxide emission intensive production from ambitious developed nations to third-world nations not only serves no purpose in climate protection but also becomes detrimental to the economy. But hindering world trade would only cause more harm to the climate.

An illustration of this is China’s trade condition. China produces its goods for export using relatively cleaner sources of energy. It imports various other products. If China were to stop importing and produce those products by leveraging their abundantly available coal energy, there would be tremendous increase in China’s carbon dioxide emissions. Hence, the transfer of carbon dioxide emissions alone cannot be the basis for climate tariffs. The PIK researchers believe that the area of focus should be the nature of energy production. The climate protection trade policies should be analyzed further from the perspective of clean national energy production and development of innovative low emission production technologies.