Will there be any serious action on carbon emissions?
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Posted on February 7, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Well, just when I think I’m the world’s biggest skeptic, someone puts it right in print. Today, the Washington Post Op-Ed writer, Robert J. Samuelson, said, despite the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he suspects little if any meaningful action will be taken to curb the rise in carbon dioxide emissions.
Don’t be fooled. The dirty secret about global warming is this: we have no solution.
Why? because the world depends upon fossil fuels to “sustain economic growth, which — in all modern societies — buttresses political and social stability.”
Well, then we are doomed indeed. Sadly, I think he may be right. The technology does not exist to replace fossil fuels any time soon — and the globe is warming now. Carbon emissions are on the rise, which means more gases that will hover in the atmosphere heating things up for the next century or more to a degree no one really knows yet.
Samuelson points out, as others have, that China will one day soon surpass the US in carbon emissions. But the accusation they make towards us bites a bit — the West created this crisis, now it wants developing countries to stop on their way to development.
China has a bit of an attitude about this — along with a huge pollution problem as the engine of its economic growth is the dirtiest fossil fuel there is — coal. As reported in the NY Times today, China seems to feel that since the rich western countries have emitted the carbon that is now warming the globe, those same countries have the onus of responsibility to lead in cutting emissions.
The front page of the Financial Times (FT) also carried a story about this. Jiang Yu, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said:
“It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions. Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility.”
Ouch — unshirkable. That hurts.
But these folks have a point. As Samuelson points out:
Poor countries won’t sacrifice economic growth — lowering poverty, fostering political stability — to placate the rich world’s global warming fears. Why should they? On a per-person basis, their carbon dioxide emissions are only about one-fifth the level of rich countries. In Africa, less than 40 percent of the population even has electricity.
And there you have it, one more time. There is an equity issue related to our ecological crises, and it is the elephant in the room. Everyone is dancing around it, and no one in our western countries wants to address it.
Meanwhile, the FT notes that China “is adding more electricity generating power each year than the entire UK (Britain) national grid.” Yikes! Which means at least this — China won’t reduce their emissions if we don’t take the lead, and we cannot address the dirty stuff China is emitting into our atmosphere until we address our own.
Samuelson is right about this, too. The only way out of the crisis is through inevitably unpopular and disruptive policies — like making oil and gasoline very expensive, like taxes on oil, or better, a carbon tax. But most important of all is that we in the rich industrial and post-industrial societies must reduce our consumption — a lot and very soon.
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