How should carbon be accounted for (worldwide)?

How it's counted should be cumulatively - how much is needed for production of a product in a country.

Where a product contains multiple sub-products (possibly from other countries) then this is included also, so total carbon required to produce e.g. a tractor, will include production of the steel, steel production will include the fuel etc.

How it's charged should be only what is added by a producer - if I built a tractor, I shouldnt be charged for production of the steel, only transport of it.

Total transparency on emission involved in products can show where reductions can be made, and what is the most damaging, and what we as a society could/should cut back on.

But carbon credits/taxes should only be levied on the carbon you add to the system

True. Thing is Ireland plays a role as a major dairy and beef producer for Europe as we can produce more and / or higher quality foodstuffs on a largely grass based system compared to many other EU countries. While a lot of our agricultural produce is exported to our trading partners in Europe - we then get stung by the EU for the carbon of those foodstuffs consumed in other countries.

Now we could stop all production and other EU countries would have to produce their own or more likley import those foodstuffs from countries with few if any environmental controls. And stopping or reducing what we produce well means that our food export earnings will be significantly reduced.

And all that when globally the largest contribution at over 70% to greenhouse gases - is the use of fossil fuels in the energy, transport and industrial sectors 😑

So what you are suggesting is that carbon be treated like VAT with each producer claiming back the part counted in the previous link in the chain?

We're not the only ones screwed by the current carbon counting mechanism. China says the same thing. The system isn't fair. They are producing tons of products for western markets. They get dinged for it. The UK's emissions have fallen dramatically in the last 30 years. They've made great progress in many areas but a large amount of their emissions reductions has to do with exporting their manufacturing to countries like China.

I'm not sure you can create a set of rules that don't disadvantage one country or another without creating a system that's too complex to actually calculate transparently. Really at the end of the day there is one global climate budget for 1.5C or 1.6C etc. The national budgets are just our way of trying to divide up the global budget because we don't have global cooperation on climate action.

I'm unsure if climate budgets, especially if used to reduce production in one country just so that it's moved to another country, are really going to have a positive climate effect overall. We see a similar problem with carbon pricing (carbon taxes, cap and trade etc) that if the carbon price is high and transporting the end product is cheap that manufacturing moves. This is very true for steel production. Steel production produces a huge amount of carbon. The end product is really cheap to transport across the world. It's a key driving force for why steel production is moving.

In reality either we need major global cooperation (unlikely) or we need to adopt things like carbon pricing in the EU and match it with a carbon border adjustment tax. Carbon border adjustment tax is where the EU would tax Chinese imports to EU based on how much carbon they released in the production process in China. Levelling the internal EU market and external market. That way we can exert our major market pressure to force other countries to reduce carbon as opposed to exporting our carbon intensive industries to other countries that aren't playing by the same carbon budget rules as us.

Currently we're just playing accounting games to move carbon off our balance sheets while still emitting the same amount of carbon globally. As a result carbon emissions continue to rise globally.