Green and pleasant land? You forgot the empire when counting CO2

Plus: Forget oil, COP28 is turning into a party for the red meat lobby.

This column is for Callaway Climate Insights subscribers only, but it’s OK to share once in a while. Was it shared with you? Please subscribe.

Hoyle Offshore Wind Farm, North Wales. Photo: Terry Kearny/flickr.

In recent times, I haven’t been shy about touting the renewables efforts of my native land, the United Kingdom. After all, it has become the second-biggest producer of offshore wind power (after China) and is the world’s leader in the development of tidal energy. And, according to the International Energy Agency, it has reduced coal-fueled electricity production to almost zero and cut CO2 emissions by over 45% between 1990 and 2020, way ahead of most other nations.

And so, I thought, despite the UK having been the initial leader of the Industrial Revolution, its overall impact on climate change had been relatively modest, in part because it is a small nation with a population of only about 20% of the U.S., which is by far the world’s historically greatest polluter.

But then I forgot that it used to have the biggest empire in the world. And that changed the whole equation.