When it comes to global warming, George W. Bush got one thing right and everything else wrong.
- - Wrong: Science has shown that the earth’s climate is indeed warming.
- Wrong: Climate change is in fact largely induced by human industrial activity.
- Wrong: We don’t have forever to study the affects of carbon emissions
before seas rise, weather becomes unstable and the fundamental natural
systems that support life break down. It’s already happening. The next
20-30 years are crucial if we are to turn things around.
- Wrong: Stabilizing the atmosphere by reducing greenhouse gas
emissions would not be a fatal stab to the American economy. Serious
efficiency measures, rapid deployment of proven renewable energy
sources, development of frontier technologies and carbon markets could
all be opportunities to stimulate economic activity and create
substantial new industries and jobs.
- Wrong: Those who advocate measures to curb carbon emissions are not involved in some plot to cripple the American economy.
- Wrong: Voluntary measures to curb GHG/carbon emissions are not
adequate. It will take concerted and sustained government policies to
create a sustainable economy.
- Wrong: New technology is not sufficient to stop global warming.
- Wrong: Markets alone are not enough to create a sustainable future.
- Wrong: Unilateralism is not the way to lead the world toward a prosperous, sustainable future.
- Wrong: Pulling out of the Kyoto Treaty negotiations was not in the
best interests of the United States, no matter how flawed the
negotiations or the final treaty.
What
Bush got right was this: Any attempt to deal with climate change that
doesn’t include the developing giants like China, India, Brazil and
Mexico, is a nonstarter.
Above all, China. With more than one
fifth of the world’s population and an industrialized economy growing
at the rate of 10 percent per year, China is on target to soon become
the world’s largest source of carbon emissions, contributing 40 percent
of the world’s total by 2050, according to some estimates. China’s
development is also bound to have the biggest human impact on the
planet’s environment and life support systems such as air, soil, the
oceans and forests.
Building a new coal-fired electric
generation plant at the rate of one every two weeks, China is the big
gorilla in the global warming crisis. If China develops a car culture
along the wasteful and polluting lines of the American car culture,
which the Chinese government is currently hell-bent to do, we can
probably kiss this old world goodbye. Perhaps the best summation of
China’s environmental situation can be found in Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.
While China is marching rapidly toward a First-World economy and
lifestyle for its people, the Middle Kingdom is a generation or more
behind in environmental consciousness and public policies to stem the
accelerating environmental degradation. Diamond describes the most
distinctive feature of Chinese history bearing on its future as
“lurching”—the propensity of this massive, unified and hierarchical
society to sway from one side or priority to another. Thus, in only the
past hundred years, the Communist revolution, the Great Leap Forward,
the Cultural Revolution, and, now, economic development as the singular
and top priority. He says that all we can reasonably conclude about
China’s environmental problems is that they will get a lot worse before
they get better, because of time lags and the momentum of environmental
damage already under way.
Yet the very centralization of
power in China that is at the root of the lurching syndrome also means
that China’s rulers can swing on a dime and implement policies that
could leapfrog over First-World industrialization technologies to get
China to prosperity in a sustainable way. Helping China to get there is
the single greatest challenge facing the global community today and for
the next 25 years. In this context, Bush’s nondiplomacy on global
warming is a self-fulfilling kind of vision. By walking away from the
Kyoto Treaty process, in part on the rationalization that China and the
other major developing countries were not included, Bush all but
ensured that China would not become engaged in organized global efforts
to curb GHG emissions until at least 2012, when the first round of
Kyoto ends.
I call it rationalization, because if the Bush
administration took China’s and the other major developing countries’
participation in Kyoto seriously, they would have stayed at the table
and negotiated just such provisions in the final treaty. But that would
have required diplomacy and leadership. Now, in the wake of the July G8
meeting’s abject failure to draw Bush back into the family of nations
on climate change, it will be up to Europe to engage the so-called Plus 5 nations (China,
India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico). Tony Blair knows this well. He
invited the Plus 5 to the Gleneagles G8 summit. This can be viewed as
the opening round of talks in the second phase of a global consensus to
reduce carbon emissions.
In an interview in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s journal On Earth
(Summer 2005 edition), Blair’s climate change advisor John Ashton said
that for Europe, engaging China in processes to curb global warming has
more urgency at this point than continuing to expend effort trying to
change George Bush’s mind: “This conversation will open up technology
choices that will that will enable China to meet its urgent needs for
energy security while simultaneously meting out mutual need for climate
security. In a way, I think that political energy on the European side
is better invested there at the moment than it is in the U.S.
administration. I also think this would get the attention of the United
States pretty quickly if it started to affect anything real, because
what Europe and China would be doing is laying the foundation for the
next stage of the global energy economy.”
It could well turn out that even the one thing Bush got right, he got wrong.
Bloggers
and other instant experts like myself are supposed to have all the
answers. But if I may be permitted a small moment of uncertainty, it
would be about whether and how far China should be pressed to
democratize. As a matter of principle, I believe that democratization
and poverty eradication are two fundamental elements in the necessary
cooperation between the First and Third Worlds it will take to build
the new global energy economy. But should we instead accept that this
centralized authoritarian system formed by the combination of Chinese
state socialism and private materialism, which is responsible for both
the lurching and the environmental degradation in China, is now the
best option for a lurch toward global cooperation on carbon emissions
and the quickest way towards a more sustainable Chinese economy?
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