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Did you hear about the climate-change agreement President Obama just made with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao? The one that the noted magazine Scientific American just touted as "More Important than Copenhagen"?
Unless you read SciAm on a regular basis, you probably didn’t. And that’s not your fault. The places where most Americans get most of their news — drive-time radio and the evening TV news — haven’t mentioned it.
Nor are they likely to mention another salient fact: That the Kyoto agreement, the one to which most other major industrialized nations subscribe (we didn’t because Bush wouldn’t, and China didn’t because we didn’t), is working quite well and cutting emissions right on schedule — and without hurting the economies of the signatories:
And note what hasn’t happened: the economies of the Kyoto signatory countries haven’t been hobbled by soaring energy prices. The trading mechanism hasn’t been fatally compromised by market manipulators. Industry hasn’t fled en masse to countries like China that lack binding emissions limits.
We can do better than Kyoto, and ultimately any effort to combat climate change will only be successful if it encompasses all the major emitting countries, including China, India, and Brazil. But the message from Europe’s experience couldn’t be simpler: cap-and-trade works.
Well, now that the US and China are finally ending their game of climate-change chicken, it looks like we will soon be able to do better than Kyoto. And a friendly and ongoing relationship with the nation that, along with us, is responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s current emissions is key to making this happen.
Pity to see all of this flushed down the GOP/Media Complex’s memory hole so they can yammer about the best way to greet foreign heads of state.
[UPDATE: Watch as Jane Hamsher goes toe-to-toe with John McCormack of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard about the effectiveness of Obama's Asian trip.]
2 Comments
“Industry hasn’t fled en masse to countries like China that lack binding emissions limits.”
That’s because China generally has tighter emissions limits on new construction for industry and coal-fired power generation capacity, and on motor vehicles than we do… significantly. And these limits are enforced.
The big problem is in the legacy stuff – the old “iron rice bowl” industries like coal mining and (low quality, antiquated) steelmaking, that keep tends of millions employed, well away from the economic boom… as well as their legacy coal-fired power plants. As a poor country, it can’t simply force scrubbers and other costly improvements onto these old, severely-loss making, subsidized and basically bankrupt industries – many of which are kept running only to keep their workers fed (these aren’t the ones creating wealth for the country). Basically, what they seem to be doing is shutting down and demolishing non-compliant (exempt) legacy plants and factories idled because of economic failture, but they also fear the massive social instability which would result if they simply shut down facilities that are non-compliant but still operational.
The even bigger problem is shear size. Even if China manages to get wealthier in a much more sustainable way than the way we live today, they’ll still add massively to the global output greenhouse gases by virtue of getting wealthier.. and here we get to an issue of basic economic justice. The argument can be made by the Chinese that agreeing to limits based on their current level of under-development is tantamount to placing a cap on their capacity to catch up to us in terms of economic devevelopment, even if they do so sustainably.. which is something they will (and should) never agree to do.
The Indians and Brazilians persuasively make the same arguments.
Oh, exactly. They want to get onto wind and solar ASAP, but the legacy industries are the big issue. Ironically, the worldwide economic downturn has bought them (and the planet as a whole) nearly two years’ worth of time, as factory production (and emissions) dropped as factories shut down or scaled back output — and that has given the factory owners the chance to retool to better, cleaner technologies.
Meanwhile, the whole OMG Obama’s bowing to them ‘cuz they have us by the balls is nicely debunked here. They need us as much as we need them.