IN the wake of Monday’s unprecedented UN debate on climate change, the US State Department today hosts a meeting of the 17 countries that between them are responsible for some 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Besides the United States — still the No. 1 polluter, they include the fast emerging economic superpowers of China, India and Brazil.
In itself it is significant that the Chinese are willing participants in these talks. With their burgeoning demand for power, they are on average opening one new coal-fired electricity generating station every week and bid fair to overtake the US as No. 1 polluter. Nevertheless Beijing will be sitting down today in Washington with some reservations about what proposals the Americans are going to put on the table.
It has always been the argument of the developing economies that First World countries that in the last century prospered as they polluted should put their own houses in order first. Any attempt to coerce the emerging economic giants into immediate anti-pollution measures would trammel their growth and be discriminatory. Indeed there is a strong suspicion in both Beijing and New Delhi that the Americans are now using the issue of greenhouse gas emissions as a way to preserve their own commercial hegemony.
Such misgivings will not be allayed by powerful US lobbyists formed of major utilities, environmentalists and labor unions wanting to punish US trading partners who are not deemed to be cutting carbon emissions. The penalties would include obliging offender states to buy what are being called “international reserve allowances” which would effectively be extra taxes imposed on goods exported to the United States.
This is a risky avenue. It threatens to open up trade wars which will inevitably divert attention from the core issue, which is reducing the world’s carbon foot print and its almost certain acceleration of what is equally clearly a natural change in the world’s climate cycle. Existing carbon offset deals, whereby air travelers, consumers and industries buy credits which finance energy-efficiency projects in developing countries seem to many to be dubious. At best they may be a wooly way of allowing First World consumers to feel better about their energy-intensive lifestyles, which they are not however prepared to change to any great degree. At worst they may turn out to be an unregulated racket.
The “feasible solutions” that State Department officials say today and tomorrow’s meetings will pursue, do not need to focus on trading the right to pollute nor yet on deciding on an order in which countries should be cleaning up their environmental acts. The solution in fact seems as simple as the problem is serious. The pollution everywhere has to be first capped, then reduced and then eliminated. Building and installing the technology, from efficient light bulbs to sophisticated flue-gas cleaners represents a massive economic opportunity. The technology should be licensed worldwide. And the whole global effort can be funded by credits from a new World Environment Bank that within prudential parameters lends freely, without bargaining or rivalry to absolutely everyone.
