Global Warming Rejected by the Poor?

Global Warming Rejected by the Poor?

by Deb Powers

 

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens tells us that the poor of the world have rejected the "theory" of global warming. Well, he actually tells us that they've told the "global warming alarmists" to get lost.

His op-ed starts with the truth that Chinese and Indian officials have basically refused to sign on to carbon caps set at the climate change summits. It then wanders off into some rather difficult, tortured logic to prove that government interference in those countries has led to a disgusting, polluted mess, but never resolves his central argument. The whole argument presented by Mr. Stephens seems to be that if global warming were really such a threat to the world, the Chinese and Indian governments should be racing toward Copenhagen, pens at the ready to sign on to carbon caps that they feel will cripple their ability to compete economically in the world.

Mr. Stephens asks:

Roughly 75% of Indians—some 800 million people—live on $2 a day or less, adjusted for purchasing power parity. In China, it’s about 36%, or about 480 million. That means the two governments alone are responsible for one in every two people living at that income level.

If climate change is the threat Mr. Annan claims it is, India and China ought to be eagerly beating the path to Copenhagen. So why aren’t they?

 Mr. Stephens never actually answers that question, not even theoretically. Instead he goes on to explain that the world's poor understand something that the rest of us in clean, industrialized nations do not - that capitalism - though he never uses that word - leads to cleaner cities and better standards of living for everyone. In fact, he states:

Facts tell a different story. When Deng Xiaoping began introducing elements of a market economy in 1980, Chinese life expectancy at birth was 65.3 years. Today it is about 73 years. The numbers are probably a bit inflated, as most numbers are in the People’s Republic, but the trend line is undeniable. In India, life expectancy rose from 52.5 years in 1980 to about 67 years today. If this is the consequence of following the “American economic model” then poor countries need more of it.

He's right about one thing. When a country makes more money as a whole, then everyone in that country is better off economically. He's very mistaken in some other points. For instance, he contends that the air pollution in Beijing is due to "lingering government control of industry".

The "real source of China's pollution problem," he says, is "a state-led industrial policy geared toward production, and state-owned enterprises (especially in “dirty” sectors like coal and steel) that strive to meet production quotas, and state-appointed managers who don’t mind cutting corners in matters of safety or environmental responsibility".

Thus, he concludes, "it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too."

Wrap your head around that for a minute. The Chinese environment is more polluted than the U.S. environment, according to Mr. Stephens, because the government forces them to pollute. In other words, if corporations were allowed to be cleaner - if they were freed from the tyranny of a government that demands they make as much profit as possilbe  - they would happily become as pollution free as American factories and production plants.

Which leaves me wondering why American companies are racing each other to build factories and plants in China, where they are free from the tyranny of government intervention that forces them to do things like scrub the emissions they spew into the air and cool the water they pump into the rivers. At least, that's the reason that small-government capitalists give for wanting to roll back environmental and safety standards to the good old days when they could pollute the earth, air and rivers without any nasty government agencies getting in the way.

Mr. Stephens also ignores a few salient facts about India and China's internal policies with regards to renewable energy. The fact is that while both China and India - who actually have a lower carbon footprint per capita than any industrialized country - have stated that the Copenhagen agreement will unfairly hamper them, they also lead the world in their commitment to developing clean energy options. Both China and India have set renewable energy targets that are well above those agreed to by developed countries - countries that have to battle corporations who complain how much it will cost them to retool and rework the grid and switch their energy use from coal to wind, water and sun.

Mr. Stephens seems to forget that just forty years ago, you could almost walk across Lake Erie on the sludge spewed into the lake by the factories lining its shores. and that it took decades of fighting tooth and nail to force corporations to clean up their acts. The reason that China can set a goal like 15% renewable energy by 2020 or India can work toward generating 20,000 of solar energy by 2020 is that they are not bucking entrenched corporate interests more interested in preserving their profits than in preserving the planet.

(Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/tulielf)