I was going to write two posts about matters musical, but it’ll wait. First, Krugman has an NYT column about global warming and China, where he says the Chinese need to cut back on emissions, and should face economic sanctions if they don’t voluntarily do so fast enough:
As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.
It’s time to save the planet. And like it or not, China will have to do its part.
I don’t think he gets nearly enough push-back in the comments section. A few thoughts:
0: Speaking for myself, a world 4-6 C warmer with all that entails, but with continued third world growth, is still preferable to that of today, with manageable temperatures but billions in absolute poverty. Both of those are awful options, and better can be done than each, but those two alternatives aren’t equally awful.
1: The different costs of climate change aren’t all uniformly distributed across the planet. The Chinese are more likely to pay attention to costs that impact them directly. Loss of land in Bangladesh/Bengal or more malaria in sub-Saharan Africa aren’t such costs, for example.
2: The Chinese argument – that the emissions cost of their exports shouldn’t be counted against them, because the benefits of the goods produced go to Westerners – seems fishy. It seems they can’t really accept the money payment for those same exports while disclaiming any carbon cost. I’m not dismissing outright these more sophisticated transnational accounting schemes, at least not in theory. Maybe the rest of the world ought to subsidize American/Western/Japanese research efforts, particularly in medicine and high yielding crops. Western Europe could help pay for the US Army and China and India could compensate the rest of the world for imposing a large unproductive body burden upon it. Maybe. Meanwhile, it seems a bit self-serving to use such arguments only in this specific instance.
3: There is the problem of divvying up not just carbon consumption per-annum from but the extra atmospheric carbon already created. In practice I suspect the latter won’t be accounted for. I do think deviations from per-capita-equity based carbon allocations will tend to be increasingly hard to enforce and police with time.
4: Any accounting of the cost of fighting climate change, must include the cost of forcing the Chinese (and other third-world economies) to accept lower growth rates, and by implication, lower life expectancy, lower levels of material comfort and the like.
5: There needs to be a conversation about optimal levels of environmental degradation. To be florid, we must have targets of x units of per-capita GDP growth per species extinction or acre of rainforest lost. Indeed, to say that there are economic tradeoffs, more so when dealing with poor countries, is to say that these levels aren’t optimized at small values. IPPC says we’ll experience 2 – 4 C of temperature rise this century if we do nothing. How much do we want to do, assuming magical solutions don’t drop out of the sky?
6: The more stories like this we see, the more attractive geoengineering schemes (with their considerable power and risk) will seem. About time the public conversation moved beyond glib hubris-of-man to seriously consider the technical and geopolitical challenges.
Unconnected closing thought: The New Yorker is the anti-Playboy. One only ever reads it for the pictures.
Accidental Blogger 
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