Amid all the doom and gloom that the media and some of the major environmental groups promulgated before, during and after Copenhagen last December, some voices pointed out that there were important breakthroughs. One important group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), noted that “… for the first time, all major economies, including China, India, and Brazil, as well as the United States, Russia, Japan and the E.U., have made commitments to curb global warming pollution and report on their actions and emissions in a transparent fashion, subject to ‘international consultations and analysis.'” (One particularly good analysis, from Salon.com, emerged from the sturm und drang that the media reported.)
So the good news was – and is – that two massive, rapidly developing economies, India’s and China’s, are on board and on record for getting at their greenhouse gas output. They had better be because their emissions are cranking up. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), which has been doing excellent work for years, issued a report last week that indicated that these two behemoths “… have completely nullified CO2 emission reductions in the industrialised world…” that had accrued as a result of the economic downturn in 2009. “In 2009, CO2 emissions jumped by 9% to 8.1 billion tonnes, even though China has doubled its installed wind and solar power capacity for the fifth year in a row.” In India, emissions “…continued to increase in 2009 by 6% to 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2.”
The FT points out that “China and India’s critical role in the world’s total emissions is well-known, and the two are at pains to point out that their populations do not enjoy the same standard of living as those in richer countries, whose emissions no longer rise quickly even in growth years, thanks to their post-industrial economies. Not to mention that China and India between them hold about a third of the world’s population.”
So, for instance, if China continues to increase its imports of coal from Australia to stoke its industry and soy from Brazil to feed its hogs, with all the attendant environmental and public health impacts, not the least of which is a steady growth in GHGs, then we’re never going to get ahead of the game. Climate change is going to beat us – badly.
China Fears Consumer Impact on Global Warming is the headline from the front page of today’s NYT. “If China cannot meet its own energy-efficiency targets, the chances of avoiding widespread environmental damage from rising temperatures ‘are very close to zero,’ said Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris.” The IEA, folks, is pretty conservative too.
I’ve written about the galloping consumption that has afflicted the developed world for years and that now threatens to take over the rapidly developing economies of China, India, Brazil and others. Try as valiantly as China might to reduce its energy intensity, as the NYT article notes it is, it is going to be swamped by consumerism. “Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls.”
It is now incumbent on all of us to think much more about convergence, how to lower our consumption while at the same time cooling the planet and also improving standards of living – not necessarily measured in how many cars you have in the garage.
