A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world.

The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into account and the popularization of “food miles” as short hand for carbon emissions – thus favoring local food over imported – when the reality is far more complex (Jim Mason and Peter Singer talk about this in their The Ethics of What We Eat – “buy local” may often serve as a good rule of thumb, but not as a hard-and-fast rule).

The entire article is well worth a read. Clark worries that “increasingly the politics appear to be shifting the burden of cutting carbon emissions on to the world’s poor: they must be kept in a state of noble peasanthood so that we can carry on living pretty much as before.”

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8 responses to “CO2 emissions for me, not for thee”

  1. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    (a) It’s not protectionism.

    (b) Protectionism would be GOOD.

    (c) It’s not about GUILT, but arresting the process and staving off damage.

    (d) Eventually we ought to get to something close to a global per capita limit we can all adhere to, assuming this in itself does not unduly disadvantage or penalize anybody owing to local differences in resource or energy availability. But “eventually” might not be “immediately.”

    (e) Kyoto was not only about staving off global warming, but about forcing increased and faster de-industrialization of the West in favor of more rapid and extensive industrialization of the East by making production in the West a lot more environmentally expensive than in the East. It is both weird and a relief that GW is no more a fool about this than the senate that unanimously rejected Al Gore’s treaty.

    (f) Didn’t you for a moment suspect that if this position was taken in the Spectator it was really coming to you from the same people who have been betraying and de-industrializing America with other aspects of economic globalization including free trade and immigration? His demands would further smash the American – and European! – working class and accelerate the global race to the bottom. That is what this is really about.

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  2. Lee

    Whether or not it’s protectionism or whether protectionism is sometimes justifiable (I think it is), there is something fundamentally unjust about trying to impose restrictions on developing countries in such a fundamentally lopsided way. And, it hardly needs to be pointed out, it’s a pretty poor way to get them to go along with any proposed capping scheme, isn’t it?

    Also, I get the impression that he laments the death of manufacturing in the West, or at least hardly sees it as an unmixed blessing:

    “The International Energy Agency recently made the prediction that China’s carbon emissions would overtake America’s by 2009. That may or may not happen, but even if it does, it doesn’t quite mean that the Chinese are as culpable as Americans for carbon emissions, because it rather ignores the fact that China has five times the population. Head for head, in 2003 the Chinese emitted 3.2 tonnes of carbon and India 1.19 tonnes. The US, on the other hand, emitted 19.8 tonnes of carbon per capita. The UK emitted 9.4 tonnes, Germany 9.8 tonnes and France, which has a high proportion of energy generated by nuclear power, 6.4 tonnes. But even those figures are highly misleading, because they ignore the fact that much of China’s rising carbon emissions are being spewed out in the name of producing goods for Western consumers. These are emissions, of course, which used to come from chimneys in Birmingham and Manchester, before our manufacturing base was reduced to a shadow of what it was. If Britain meets its Kyoto target in 2012 (and it may well do), it won’t be because British consumers have made sacrifices to save the planet; it will be because we, like other Western nations, have exported a sizeable proportion of our carbon emissions to China.”

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  3. gaius sempronius gracchus

    I take back all I said above. Every word.

    I say now that a per capita rule per nation is an economically and morally arbitrary rule of geographical dispersal that would not even appear fair to anybody at all except that it obviously imposes burdens on production in rich countries to the vast competitive advantage of producers in poor ones.

    It is that and only that that makes it appear in the least bit rational, just, and fair to anyone.

    To see this, consider a rule requiring equality per capita per continent, or per state (or province), or per county, or per town. Why are these not tempting?

    Why ought not industrial producers in the US to be forced to comply with a rule that says emissions per capita have to be the same in every county of the United States? Even just every state?

    Nonsense, right? And so is a per capita per country rule.

    And I think you would agree with me on that if you did not think it morally necessary to intentionally adopt rules grossly disadvantaging producers of widgets in rich countries to the advantage of producers in poor countries.

    Heck, I will risk a guess that if you did not think that, you would laugh out loud at this.

    Since I do not consider it even morally permissible, much less necessary, to encourage the global race to the bottom by intentionally ruining the producers in rich countries – and with them their workers – to advantage producers in poor ones I reject altogether all this nonsense.

    And I think all the less of such a plan when I recall that, in fact, very few rich-nation producers will be ruined and very few poor-nation ones advantaged because capitalists or corporations in rich countries will either outsource or just close their American and European factories in order to open new ones in China, India, or Indonesia.

    The burden of this deliberate transfer of jobs and investment capital will fall most heavily exactly where the burden of free trade, fair trade, and open immigration falls, on the working class of America and, as these policies overtake Europe and maybe, eventually, Japan and South Korea, the workers of those countries, too.

    A treaty to stop global warming and radically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases is needed. No one could agree more with that than I do. But no treaty loaded down with provisions that not only predictably but intentionally hobble producers in rich countries to advantage those in poor ones is acceptable.

    On the other hand, imagine a treaty dreamed up by American and European economic nationalists out to maximally advantage producers in their own parts of the world.

    Such a treaty might require, for example, that all new factories built anywhere in the world comply with extremely strict emissions limits while requiring only modest reductions at current plant anywhere in the world.

    As regards costs of environmental protection, this would advantage the West over the poor nations since by far most of the old plant is in the rich countries. The result would be that the environmental cost of production per widget, so to speak, would be higher, for example, in China than in Germany.

    If you protested that such a biased treaty unfairly discriminates in favor of currently rich nations I would agree.

    Not that the issue matters in quite the same way for you as for me.

    I think the US market should be protected from imports of any goods that can be produced abroad for cheaper sale here only because in the places where they are produced the workers, or environment, or consumers, or public are less protected and more open to exploitation than they are here.

    I think that is grossly unfair competition and allowing it is every bit as much a betrayal of the working class and the whole people as allowing, or even intentionally encouraging, manufacturers to close their plants in unionized, high-wage, high-tax states with strong laws protecting consumers, workers, and the environment and open new ones in non-union, low-wage, low-tax states with weak protections.

    Would it make sense to intentionally write national environmental laws disadvantaging auto production in such high-wage, union states in favor of low-wage, non-union states?

    Would it be even minimally sane to write environmental laws with the intention of forcing manufacturers to close up relatively clean plants in high-wage states in order to open much dirtier plants and pay much lower wages in non-union states?

    Why does that even appear to make sense to anyone?

    To me, it’s just weird. And I suspect it all comes down to the fallacious notions of group, national, or racial rights.

    PS. GW and others of his ilk just oppose doing anything that increases the costs of production in the US. Hence his opposition all along to even admitting global warming.

    The Republicans will eventually accept the idea and then do all they can to heap all costs of adjustment onto the working class and, yes, foreigners, just as far as they can.

    That does not excuse deliberate efforts by the globalist left to shift the costs entirely onto the shoulders of those now producing, rather than equally onto those of all producing in future in proportion to their volume of production.

    Ideally, costs and sacrifices should be distributed globally on an equal per widget basis, so to speak, with tax and other policies in place within each country to ensure as much of the burden as possible falls as far as possible on the capitalist class rather than any other.

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  4. Lee

    Hmmm – I’ll have to think about this some more.

    But what about the fact that in many poor countries the cheapness of labor is their chief competitive advantage? If you hobble their industry via protectionism of “first world” markets how are they ever supposed to move out of poverty? Or are you envisioning them producing chiefly for domestic markets too?

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  5. gaius sempronius gracchus

    How did an argument for radically increasing the costs of production in the Occident while not increasing it in China in a global environment of free trade get into a Western rightist mag?

    Not a leftist mag, where you would expect it. A rightist mag.

    A Chinese bribe?

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  6. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    So your idea is that to get out of poverty they have to take your job?

    Is that your plan for helping people out of poverty in Appalachia? Close plants in high-wage states with strong environmental protection and replace them with plants in the hills offering low wages and no environmental protection?

    Who, now, is saying this is a zero sum game, and that to help Peter we must hurt Paul?

    What I propose is not to hobble them but to refuse to hobble production in the wealthy nations any more, for environmental reasons, than production is hobbled elsewhere.

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  7. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Btw, if nations A and B, goegraphically far apart, are about equal wrt widget production so that neither has any competitive advantage then production for the home market in each, but not for export, is not only what I would expect but what makes good economic sense.

    Transport halfway around the world would add quite unnecessary costs.

    And if B’s only advantarge over A is that labor in B is less protected then action to prevent outsourcing from A to B makes good sense, too.

    Without that, it’s exactly as Kucinich says. A race to the bottom.

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  8. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Not to beat it to death, but one last thought.

    If A is rich but of small population while B is poor but of large population, should A be searching for ways to make B as rich, per capita, as A?

    Doesn’t this depend in some measure on whether B is an enemy and a threat? Or how likely B is to become one?

    OK, the Communists of China are not really Communists, any more. But I wouldn’t trust them any further than I could throw them.

    Do you really trust them enough to want them to be as rich, per capita, as us, and hence our match and way more than our match, militarily?

    The other face of economic nationalism incorporates reflections like that. Pat Buchanan and others are by no means foolish to raise such concerns.

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