Dr.Göran Duus-Otterström, Senior Fellow in Climate Security
Göran Duus-Otterström is associate professor in the Department of Politics at Aarhus University, professor of political Science at the University of Gothenburg, associate researcher at the Stockholm Institute for Futures Studies, deputy editor of Res Publica, He was a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen. His research interests are normative political theory and justice theory. Participation in fair play retributivism and punishment issues, pollution-based climate justice: sources, thresholds, model projects.
How to manage disasters in a risk society
Dear Xu,
I am going to assume you mean 450 words in total and not for each question.
1. What do you think is the main controversial point of consumption-based (CB) accounting as another method of building national greenhouse gas emission inventory?
The most controversial question is whether CB accounting exonerates the “real” polluters. Politically, and to a certain extent philosophically, it can seem that counting emissions at their source lines up responsibility and costs. That is not a thought which holds up against critical scrutiny especially well, since consumers could be said to cause pollution just as much as producers. But a real, secondary worry is that if we count emissions at the point of final consumption, then actors have less control over emissions they are ascribed. For example, it is not clear how well an importing country could influence the export sector of another country since it lacks direct jurisdiction.
2. In your opinion, what causes the decrease of the difference between production-based (PB) accounting and consumption-based (CB) accounting in recent years?
I am not an expert on this, but from the analyses I have seen, the difference was never that big to begin with for countries in general but was to a large degree driven by China. When China exported more and produced in a CO2 intensive way, the difference was large; conversely, once China started being less of a net exporter in the global economy and became less CO2 intensive, the difference between the two mo
Editor Assistant Research Fellow: Xianglin Gu
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