President Barack Obama and his administration, as well as our non-Administration friends on the left, have been telling us that not only are reducing carbon dioxide emissions good for us, vital for our survival, but will be an economic boon as well, as we develop new technologies and reinvest in our infrastructure.
If so, it would seem to me that a country like India, with a huge population but an underdeveloped economy would welcome such ideas with open arms. Unlike the US, India isn’t facing huge industrial replacement costs, but needs to build new plants where none existed peviously. Add to that India’s warmer, steamier climate, and using carbon-reducing or eliminating techniques would seem to be the perfect fit for the country which bills itself as the world’s largest democracy.
India rejects emissions limits¹
By Robert Burns, Associated PressNEW DELHI – India stood firm yesterday against Western demands to accept binding limits on carbon emissions, even as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed optimism about an eventual climate-change deal to India’s benefit.
“There is simply no case for the pressure that we – who have among the lowest emissions per capita – face to actually reduce emissions,” India’s minister of environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, told Clinton and her visiting delegation in a meeting.
“And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours,” he added.
Much more at the link. But the reasoning is clear: India doesn’t want its economy hampered by money spent not on production but on reducing CO2 emissions, or the even more futile “carbon credits trading,” which does nothing to actually reduce CO2 emissions, but simply moves money around.
One simple truth overrides everything: India has over a billion mouths to feed, and the country is far more concerned with developing real wealth and food to support its huge population. Such a country ought to be very interested in jumping on the carbon emissions cutting bandwagon, if such actually promised — as in really promised, not pie-in-the-sky promised — better, stronger, more sustainable economic growth. But the Indians, a people made practical by necessity, aren’t interested in things which will slow down their economic development, because they can’t afford to take silly chances.
This has a lesson for us, as well, if we can be practical enough to learn it.
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¹ – The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, 20 July 2009, p. A-2
Some developed nation has to take a significant first step to get things going to combat global warming/climate change.
We hurt our global credibility when Bush & Co opted to ignore the Kyoto meeting in 2001, so India can say: If the richest nation in the world won’t do anything, if the one responsible for about 22.2% of the globe’s carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion won’t do it, then why should we who omit only 4.9%? 22.2% makes us the largest carbon emitter on the globe. (China is next at 18.4%, the EU next at 14.7%, then Russia at 5.6%, then India at 4.9%.)
Stated another way, with our population being 0.307 billion and India’s being 1.16 billion, per capita we emit 17 times the amount of carbon than India does.
Under these circumstances, with these facts in mind, were you the decider from India, what would your position on reduction of carbon emissions be?
My position is that we should expect ourselves to cut down our emissions 17 times more than India. In other words, our reduction should be proportional to our emission.
Of course this is going to be difficult! Some developed nation will have to stand up and be counted, to get the ball rolling on this most serious challenge! We need to step up and meet our global responsibilities.
Forget Koyoto and the CO2 hysteria.
How are we going to tax bovine flatulence? Will some company get a billion dollar boondoggle contract for a fartometer?
Perry, India’s per capita income is 40,000 Rupees, about $950 US dollars. If they increased their per capita 17 times they would still be $2,000 USD under the poverty rate here. How will the US cutting its emissions and subsequently its GDP 17 times reduce anything? It would increase poverty here and business and jobs would go there.
I understand that you believe in AGW, Perry. I also realize that in doing so you think everyone should too, and do whatever is deemed necessary to solve it. But the reality is that people in Inda, China, Pakistan etc., are just begining to get a taste of freedom and economic growth. They are not going to buy in to anything that will reverse this. And the truth is, if they ain’t buyin’ in we can’t or we will loose our freedom and growth and it will be we who earn $950 per capita.
I believe in free and open markets. And I believe these markets are mankinds best way to solve poverty and even global warming if there is such a thing. Men, left to their own ingenuity can usually solve just about anything. It is imperative in my view that we do not compromise our freedom thinking a command government is out savior. It never has been. Men produce more, advance further and live freer when government is limited. If we’ve learned nothing from the last century we should have learned that. Unfortunately, the AGW guys seem to see it as a money tree to enrich themselves. They want government to force people to do things they wouldn’t do on their own. We can solve all these things but not through force and coersion. Through the evolving technology and inventivness of people trying to advance themselves, their families, and their nations.
I believe in free and open markets.
I believe in hammers.
I don’t go around using hammers on everything or treating them as the only possible answer to any problem.
Art: “Forget Koyoto and the CO2 hysteria.”
Here is a prime example of the denial of science typical of wingnut ideologues who typically understand little of the science behind AGW.
Actually, the US Senate rejected Kyoto by a vote of 95 – 0. Not one Senator voted for it, not Ted Kennedy, not Barbara Boxer, not even Paul Wellstone. And that was during Slick Willie’s term, not Bush’s.
Why should Bush have honored something his predecessor and the vast majority of Democrats rejected?
“Why should Bush have honored something his predecessor and the vast majority of Democrats rejected?”
Simple, Eric: Because it was the right thing to do. Read my previous comments in this thread to see why!
Moreover, the science of AGW had firmed up in the intervening years between Clinton and Bush-43.
What are we to do, wait until it is too late to act, then pass this apparently soon to be irreversible problem onto our children and their children? Do you have any children Eric?
Maybe they should give up their western technology completely, so they can return to the edenic lifestyle and environmental conditions that existed in India before the influence of white Christian heterosexist technologists warped their culture and way of life.
Or, they could simply figure that since they are starting more or less fresh, industrialization-wise, they ought to get a jump on those wonderful green technologies that promise limitless energy at no environmental costs. Aside from an outright desert, where better to use solar panels than in a sweltering tropical hell hole?
Or, they could just pollute like all get out and let the sulphur dioxide do its work in lowering local temps.
“China now exceeds the United States as the single largest GHG emitter, and accounts for more than a fifth of global GHG emissions;” wiki
“The world’s countries contribute different amounts of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. The table below shows data compiled by the Energy Information Agency (Department of Energy), which estimates carbon dioxide emissions from all sources of fossil fuel burning and consumption. Here we list the 20 countries with the highest carbon dioxide emissions (data are for 2006)
1. China 6017.69
2. United States 5902.75″
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/graph-showing-each-countrys.html
Perry wrote:
Would have been rather authoritarian of him had he done so, wouldn’t you say?
In anticipation of the final form of the Kyoto Accords, the United States Senate, the body which is constitutionally authorized to ratify treaties, passed a “sense of the Senate” resolution calling upon President Clinton not to sign the Kyoto Accords if they contained unbalanced emission requirements; the vote was unanimous, 95-0. President Clinton ignored the Senate’s wishes, and dispatched Vice President Gore to Kyoto to sign the treaty for the United States.
Of course, President Clinton never submitted the Kyoto Accords to the Senate for ratification, because he knew that they’d be rejected. Wouldn’t you agree that there’s something wrong with a President signing a treaty he knows cannot be ratified, which nevertheless places the United States under an obligation to do nothing to sabotage the treaty in the interim between ratification or rejection, and then refusing to submit it to the Senate?
President Bush, however, made a serious mistake when it came to Kyoto. He withdrew our signature, which had the effect of removing our obligation to do nothing to undermine the treaty pre-ratification or rejection. What he should have done was submit it to the Senate for ratification, knowing that the Senate would reject it.
The notion that President Bush should have honored a treaty that had no chance of being ratified simply because “it was the right thing to do” strikes me as an odd statement from you. That would have been subverting the constitutional process. If he had believed that Kyoto “was the right thing to do,” then he should have submitted it to the Senate, recommending and working for ratification.
DNW wrote:
Which was, of course, what I wrote originally. Why wouldn’t someplace like India, which is in its earlier stages of industrialization, want to try to go green from the beginning? After all, if the technologies are everything the advocates promise, then it would be to India’s economic advantage to do so, right?
What science? Summers here in MN have, if anything, gotten a bit cooler. So far this year I’ve used the A/C in my car maybe 5 times total, and we’re getting into late July. Remember, Al Gore isn’t talking about minor variations in climate, but rather global catastrophe if we don’t take drastic action NOW. And yet, the only “evidence” of any sort of climate change is that the weather may be getting a bit more pleasant (I, for one, am noticing less bugs than usual).
Well, as I recall, the “Right thing to do” during the Nineties under Clinton/Gore was to promote maximum economic growth. The 90′s were the decade when the SUV really came into its own, and US and foreign car companies were making huge profits selling them by the millions. And not a peep out of Al Gore, never mind he was the #2 man in the Executive Branch at the time.
Why should Bush have killed American economic progress in the name of some far fetched climate theory, especially since his immediate predecessors were unwilling to sacrifice their political popularity to do so?
Dana Pico wrote:
Yes, you did; and along with the technological and political rationale for the Indians’ turning down the request, goes the Anthropogenic Global Warming TRUE BELIEVERS’ rationale for not insisting on their making comparative reductions gauged in absolute terms: “social justice”.
See, although technology may be a two edged sword from the TRUE BELIEVER’S perspective, a sword we would be largely better off without ( we cite the goofy lefty airwaves figure Thom Hartmann as an example of this mentality), it nonetheless represents a kind of forbidden fruit conferring inequitably distributed power on the exclusive possessor. Thus, the innocent “disadvantaged” are entitled to acquire the bad things we have, so long as we have them, and even longer.
The doctrine of atheist masochists; in search of a cross to climb up on.