My biggest fear about Gore in 2000 was that he would commit us to some Global Warming restrictions. That, and the Supremes, are my two top reasons for wanting a Republican President in 08.
China to surpass US in greenhouse gas emissions this year
05/02/07
by Rossputin
Last week, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency ("IEA") announced that China will surpass the USA as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases this year rather than in 2010 as previously forecast.
The VOA's news story on the announcment includes these interesting quotes:
"The IEA's Faith Birol said Beijing's refusal to limit greenhouse gases will allow China to increase its emissions nearly unchecked.
She said this could effectively cancel out other countries' efforts to cut their own emissions. Birol said that could weaken efforts to design a global greenhouse gas treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol."
The National Center for Policy Analysis issued a press release that was also quite interesting, and I will quote it in its entirety here:
"News out of both China and Canada is bolstering the Bush administration's decision not to ratify the Kyoto global warming treaty, choosing instead to seek technological innovation and participation in the Asian-Pacific partnership on Clean
Development and Climate, according to a scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).
China is soon estimated to surpass the U.S. as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Yet earlier this month the Chinese government reaffirmed that while they would participate in negotiations to shape a post-Kyoto treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions, they would not commit to binding reductions in CO2.
"The Bush administration has been at the forefront of sound policy on at least one environmental issue," said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. "China rightly fears continued poverty and the health and welfare problems that it brings more than the distant potential indirect problems posed by global warming."
According to Burnett, the Bush administration recognized a Kyoto-style treaty would do little or nothing to prevent warming or help the environment, while putting us at a competitive disadvantage with China and other newly emerging economic powerhouses.
And now Canada's Prime Minister has apparently come to the same conclusion. Canada's Environment Minister John Baird recently said Kyoto compliance would cost Canada 275,000 jobs and push its economy into recession. Instead of Kyoto, Canada will join the U.S.-led Asian-Pacific Partnership -- whose members also include Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea. The so-called AP6 was launched in mid-2005 to make voluntary cuts in greenhouse gases.
"Too the extent that future warming poses a real threat, the answer is not harming economic growth by restricting energy use," said Burnett. "A better course is the development and diffusion of new, more efficient technologies that will allow economic growth to continue while preventing new emissions. The Asian-Pacific partnership should result in far more environmental benefits, for a far cheaper price, than proposals to artificially restrict energy use by raising prices."
The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D.C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. We depend on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share our mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants."
In the 1996 edition of its World Energy Outlook, the IEA was already forecasting that China's emissions increase would be nearly equal to that of the entire OECD (a group of 30 countries including the USA, most of Western Europe, Japan, Korean, Australia, and more). You can see the PDF of the 1996 World Energy Outlook here:
iea.org
(For some reason, it was scanned in rather than just created as a PDF, so it is not easily searchable.) Now, coming to the release of the 1997 Outlook, the IEA has determined that China's emissions are growing even more rapidly than previously thought.
As the NCPA correctly notes, complying with something like Kyoto is a sort of unilateral economic disarmament. Additionally, even supporters of Kyoto admit that if it were to succeed it would reduce global warming only by a fraction of a degree over a century at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars of economic productivity, including all the job losses that would go along with it.
Some will argue that this news increases the necessity for us to ratify something like Kyoto, in order to have the moral standing to lean on China (and India) to control their emissions. But that assumes China and India are open to such thoughts, which they are not. China should care about true pollution, i.e. emissions into their air which actually cause their people to get sick and die young. Indeed, when I visited Xian some years ago, it seemed like dusk at noon on a sunny day because the air was so thick with smog. Blowing your nose after 24 hours in Xian would turn a tissue black. However, as the US has demonstrated, it is possible to substantially reduce that type of pollution without having to kill our economy by targeting non-pollutants like carbon dioxide.
The regime in China does not need mass unemployment in an already restive workforce within an exceptionally dynamic economy. They will not in our lifetimes consider anything like Kyoto as a reasonable policy for them to accept. The countries which did accept Kyoto have failed in meeting their targets. Air and water quality are improving all the time in most of the industrialized world primarily because of market forces and to a lesser degree because of regulation. (There is good evidence that air quality was improving before the passage of the Clean Air Act.) And although I think the government has over-regulated in most areas of the environment, at least they were generally targeting real pollution with real demonstrable health effects. Targeting the chimera of global warming is, as I've described it before, economic suicide or at least economic masochism.
One of the beautiful things about global warming, from the point of view of people like Al Gore and others who are making careers and money with their alarmism, is that they can always claim it is a coming threat. Arguing with them is like trying to prove a negative, and even though the burden of proof should be on them given the incredible costs they want to impose on society, their marketing of fear and the complicity of mainstream media in that marketing has given them an advantage in changing public opinion.
We must not only hope that our elected representatives don't sign on to economic destruction in the name of junk science. News such as this about China, while not great in terms of what it means for the environment (particularly in China) is welcome to the extent that it will keep western governments from signing on to junk policy.
rossputin.com |
