Two worlds, one climate

Climate change, we are often told, is everyone’s problem. And without a lot of help containing greenhouse gas emissions from rapidly growing emerging market countries, the prospects of avoiding disaster are small to nil.

Now you tell us, retort policymakers in the have-less countries: How convenient of you to discover virtue only after two centuries of growth and unfettered carbon emissions. Since you were the ones to get us into this mess, it’s your job to get us out. This clash of wills is a bit more nuanced than that, but not much. Almost all the net growth in greenhouse gas emissions for the last two decades — and more than half the total emissions today — is coming from the developing world. What’s more, most of the cheap opportunities for reducing emissions are to be found in the same countries. But as a matter of equity, it’s hard to argue with “you’ve had your turn, now it’s ours.” And it’s equally hard to see how the stalemate will be resolved before the world goes to hell in a plague of locusts.

The carbon emissions stats by country are startling, and would be even more startling if we had comprehensive numbers for years since 2009. Carbon emissions from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries grew by 8 per cent between 1990 and 2009, while emissions from the rest of the world grew by 73 per cent (albeit from a smaller base).

If, as expected, climate change brings rising sea levels and more severe weather of every sort — droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados — the rich countries will muddle through with dikes, crops redesigned to survive drought, more air conditioning and the like. It will be expensive, but manageable, unless global warming triggers truly destabilising changes, like the release of vast quantities of methane gas from now-frozen arctic tundra. But the rich countries’ travails may well be poor countries’ damnation: the inundation of Pacific islands, catastrophic storm surges on the Bengal plain, the collapse of farm yields in semi-arid parts of Africa, and the spread of insect-vectored disease in the warmer, wetter parts. So, fair or not, poor countries have every reason to make emissions priority one, right? Maybe, and maybe not. The iconoclastic, Nobel Prize-winning economist Tom Schelling has long argued that the rich countries’ interests diverge from those of developing countries. What poor countries need most, he says, is to invest in economic growth, which will give them the income to mitigate the consequences of climate change.

The rich countries might bully where blandishments fail, by imposing tariffs, for example, on imports that are less than green. Might, but probably won’t: The United States, in particular, is in no position to complicate its relationships with either China or India. Besides, it’s far from clear that such tariffs would meet the standards of the World Trade Organisation. A more plausible option — one that appeals in terms of both economic efficiency and social justice — would be to buy their cooperation.

Arguably, the most promising approach to gaining the cooperation of emerging market countries lies in innovation. It wouldn’t take much persuasion to get developing countries to adopt technologies that are climate-friendlier if they are also cheaper than emissions-as-usual. One could certainly imagine government-subsidised R&D that cut the cost of solar panels by 90 per cent, or transformed the hydrogen-producing artificial leaf into a viable source of fuel. The idea of a global grand bargain, in which emerging market countries would join the West in an ambitious, cost-minimising containment programme, is dead. The best hope, at least for now, is a pragmatic search for common ground, one that appeals to the angels but relies on self-interest. A decade late and a trillion dollars short, you say? To paraphrase a former secretary of defence, you go to war with the army you’ve got, not the one you’d like to have.

— Washington Post

Peter Passell, economics editor of Foreign Policy’s “Democracy Lab,” is a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute.