To the greens out there China has killed your plans on AGW
By Joliphant Posted in Archived — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
From the Times Online
Hu Jintao wants to make every Chinese twice as rich by 2020. He has done it once – in just five years, income per capita doubled to $2,000 (£983) - and the only obstacle in the Chinese President’s path is the FUEL needed to stoke the boiler in China’s locomotive
Emphasis mine.
For the greens out there that are slow on the uptake, this means even if we cut back to nothing, the Chinese will still blow away your low carbon utopia. China is already the worlds largest polluter, if they do manage to double the size of their economy in fifteen years, you can safely bet its not going to be by going green.
The real upshot is if they continue polluting at their current rates/unit GDP, the rest of world could stop and actually start absorbing on the net (As the US does thank you forest industry) and you would still see the CO2 levels going up.
Looks like its time to trade in those ideas about carbon taxes ,credits and government regulations of when you can turn on a lightbulb and get down to being business friendly again.
Even if we completely gave up carbon it wouldn't matter.
So given that austerity measures are pointless we better focus on getting rich enough that we just don't care.
Personally I am looking forward to living like George Jetson. I want a flying a car, a house that can raise itself above the weather, a wife who is not so hard on the wallet as Jane, a robot maid isn't a bad idea either.
Or to borrow a line from my favorite movie of all time.
Rest, too soon and too much we call it death. For mankind its either all the universe or nothing.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
India, Vietnam, Korea, the former Warsaw Pact, The former Soviet Union, well you get the picture.
The whole carbon cap thing was always a pipe dream. Its time to forget about it.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Let's use your numbers (which I've seen elsewhere), and also avoid adjusting for China's currency undervaluation.
China's total GHG emissions are thus about equal to those of the US, right now. Ours will not be rising significantly, both because our economy is now in a permanent low-growth condition and because our carbon-efficiency (GHG emissions per unit of economic output) is increasing.
But if China is now emitting one-fifth as many GHG per head as we do, with 4.5 times our population, where are they headed?
Doubling their economy by 2020 is severely understating the case. They will do far better than that. Their per-capita GDP is now less than than that of Iran and Venezuela. Let's say that China can get up to Mexico's per-capita GDP within a few decades. That's a five-fold increase. If their carbon efficiency remains about the same, then they'll be emitting five times as much GHG as the US does now. And even that is understating things.
Let's say they can get to South Korea's level of economic productivity. At that point, their total GHG emissions will be eight times what ours are now. Forget about China rising all the way to fully-developed status, on a level with the US. That would put them at more than twenty times the GHG emissions that we're currently at.
Why do these numbers seem so far out of whack? Because the carbon efficiency of Chinese industry is extremely low compared to ours. That will not change, because to improve it would necessarily cause a reduction in China's growth rate.
Pliny, I think you need to stop thinking about how humanity can curb GHG emissions, and start thinking about shifting to a wardrobe that's more appropriate for warmer temperatures. Because all the Nobel Peace Prizes in the world aren't going to take the Chinese off the path they're on.
Well, I support your appreciation of the magnitude of the problem, although you are more pessimistic than I am. The saving clause may be that China can't actually get that amount of carbon, at the necessary rate, and so will have to improve efficiency.
But China is not immune to the consequences. For my part, I don't think the wardrobe problem is insoluble (people have been trying out solutions), and sea level rises are uncertain. The big AGW issue is likely to be drought, and China (and India) will have a huge need for water, which may become scarce.
Said in a laughing and good way NT
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
But judging by the current air quality in, say, Beijing, whether they give a tinker's damn about said consequences is far less than a given.
And since there's roughly 1.2 BILLION of them and only about half that much between the US and Western Europe, that, well, matters.
Just saying.
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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
Obviously there is a lot of things wrong with my analysis.
First, and most hopefully, science could actually come up with a green energy source that is cheaper than carbon. On the other hand, China may turn out to have some surprises up their sleeve in regard to domestic oil and gas reserves. (Keep your eyes on PetroChina, which will soon be crosslisted on the Shanghai stock exchange, in addition to Hong Kong. They may have some big announcements to make after the crosslisting happens.)
Second, China may screw up their economic management, spawn another Mao, and drop back into the Stone Age.
Third, the growth in Chinese per-capita GDP will be (not "may be") highly asymmetric. Maybe 300 million urban inhabitants are already near developed-world productivity levels (I would hazard the guess that they're near South Korean levels, nowhere near Taiwan levels yet), while the other billion Chinese are dirt-poor, essentially living in the Stone Age now. That puts a lid on China's total growth potential.
As far as appreciating the problem, I haven't granted that AGW is something we need to do something about. Sorry for the troglodytism, but I'm far more worried about the prospect that the United States is in the process of slipping permanently out of economic leadership. And we're doing it in large part because we've internalized expectations of success to the point that we concern ourselves with problems like AGW. In short, I believe it's possible that the next generation of Americans will see our concerns with AGW as dancing while Rome burns, while their concerns will be with basic survival.
China is most definitely not immune to the consequences of large-scale environmental degradation. As I've said elsewhere, though, the Chinese regime has policy tools available to it that would be unthinkable to us. This comes from the fact that respecting basic human dignity isn't something they feel constrained to do. They can (and will) deal with social unrest caused by environmental problems by shooting troublemakers in the back of the head. There are some obvious practical problems with this approach, but they're going to try to make it work.
is collecting was really to buy carbon credits, but the waiters and busboys who gave it just didn't put it in the right account.
If the Chinese won't cut back, that just means we have to throw ourselves at the feet of the plants and die, so we can be recycled as fertilizer.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
To manny transfats and artificial colors, preservatives and sweeteners.
Their precious plants need better.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
It equates CO2 with pollution. AGW also equates a clean environment with reduced CO2.
We should encourage China to clean up its toxic discharges. We should leave them alone regarding CO2. We will have some success in the former. WE will scoffed at told where to stick it in the latter.
We can build some reasonable success over toxins.
The fallacy that CO2 is a pollutant may be imposed on us in the US by the goreons and other AGW promoters via the 5 vote idiot majority on the USSC, but we do not have to see the developing world get caught in the same idiotic trap.
Foolishness over climate, as faithfully represented here by our own pliny, is going to hurt the US in real ways, as we see here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR200710...
that CO2 should not be equated with pollution. It is a different issue. China's pollution affects most of all the Chinese, but their CO2 affects us all. Pressing on CO2 may be a harder sell, but it's the issue that most directly affects us.
You seem to say it is only a problem for greens? We all live on the same planet.
The issue in my mind has always been what will happen when the rest of the world starts emitting GHG at the per capita rates of countries like the US and Australia. Currently China is running somewhere near a fifth, and India less. And of course this will expand.
This is why I sometimes sound impatient about arguments about, say, whether 1998 was the hottest year. There is much more in the pipeline.