The Global Carbon Budget 2012 Report Shows How Pollution-Shifting from Developed Nations to Poorer Nations Makes China Look Bad — and Why American “Holier than Thou” Carbon Emissions Non-Policy Is Hypocritical

© 2012 Peter Free

 

03 December 2012

 

 

Citation — to the carbon emissions report that I am referring to

 

Corinne Le Quéré, Glen Peters, Robbie Andrew, Bob Andres, Tom Boden, Thomas Conway, Skee Houghton, Jo House, Gregg Marland, Guido van der Werf, Anders Ahlström, Laurent Bopp, Pep Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Scott Doney, Clare Enright, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris Huntingford, Atul Jain, Charlotte Jourdain, Etsushi Kato, Ralph Keeling, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Samuel Levis, Peter Levy, Mark Lomas, Ben Poulter, Mike Raupach, Jörg Schwinger, Stephen Sitch, Benjamin Stocker, Nicolas Viovy, Charlie Wilson, Soenke Zaehle, and Ning Zeng, Global Carbon Budget 2012, Global Carbon Project (03 December 2012) (PDF, PowerPoint presentation)

 

 

The point — it is easy to unfairly see China as “the problem”

 

Externalizing costs means that we pretend “hidden” economic and environmental costs evaporate and never do anything bad.  Historically, pollution is an example.

 

Today, the United States and other developed nations have transferred significant sections of their manufacturing economies to China, where laggard pollution control (which accounts in part for China’s reduced manufacturing costs) increases global greenhouse gas emissions.

 

The irony is that American leaders frequently argue that we cannot drastically reduce our own carbon emissions because it would harm our economy relative to China’s.

 

 

What is the Global Carbon Budget report — and why do we care?

 

The Global Carbon Budget 2012 is an annual report about the volume of greenhouse gas emissions.  It tracks the amount and direction of change in carbon emissions per the largest contributor nations.

 

The report is generated by the Global Carbon Project, an international non-governmental organization dedicated to generating a database for international policy makers to use in addressing greenhouse gas emissions.

 

The Earth Systems Science Partnership (ESSP) — an offshoot of the International Council for Science — runs the Global Carbon Project.

 

 

What the Global Carbon Budget report says — carbon emissions are up 3.0 percent and still headed the wrong way

 

In 2011, total world carbon emissions were up 3.0 percent over 2010.  The two top emitters were China (at 28 percent of the total) and the United States (at 16 percent).

 

China was responsible for 80 percent of the increase over the previous year.  Notably, Germany was down 3.6 percent and the United States, 1.8 percent.

 

 

“So, Pete, China’s the bad guy, right?”

 

Not exactly.

 

The rest of the world let laissez faire capitalism go where it wanted.  Within the prevailing externalization of costs paradigm, that meant that cheap labor and pollution-inviting China wound up doing most of the world’s manufacturing.

 

The hypocritical irony is that American plutocrats and politicians, having profited from sending formerly American jobs to China, now use developing China’s unwillingness to instantly curtail its economic growth (by radically reducing its greenhouse gas emissions) as an excuse for Americans to avoid significantly dealing with our own emissions.

 

 

Human inertia is exacting an inevitable future environmental price, at an ever-increasing pace

 

It is now highly unlikely that “we” can hold temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century (2100).  The Global Carbon Budget report now estimates that a 4.1 to 6 degree rise is much more likely, absent drastic changes in the world’s greenhouse gas emission policies.

 

Note

 

Two degrees Celsius was the 7-18 December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference’s arbitrarily chosen non-binding goal for restricting global warming.

 

That conference is commonly known as the Coopenhagen Climate Summit.

 

Its more technical name is “15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” and/or the “5th Meeting of the Parties (MOP 5) to the Kyoto Protocol.”

 

These tedious names indicate how much international blather goes into getting nowhere.

 

 

Why do we care about a handful of degrees?

 

For the scientifically minded, a handful of upward degrees means staggering increases in the heat content of the planet’s biosphere-inhabited layers.

 

Heating leads to increased, and often more unpredictable, system dynamics:

 

geographic changes in the distribution of moisture and temperature — affecting agriculture

 

an increasingly violent atmosphere — meaning bad storms

 

and

 

rising seas — drowning some islands and parts of coastal cities.

 

 

Does any of this matter to pragmatically minded people?

 

Perhaps.

 

Living on a drowning island or coastline will not be fun.  Wealthy people can move.  The poor cannot.

 

An anticipated decoupling between the simultaneous presence of rich soils and agriculturally beneficial climate will probably cause food supply problems.  Again, negatively affecting poor and middle income people.

 

Similarly, the amounts and reliability of ice and snow-generated water supplies are likely to decline.  These are also the sources that recharge many of the underground aquifers that we take for granted.

 

Global warming on the magnitude that we are probably headed for is going to require massive infrastructural changes to cope with.  PricewaterhouseCoopers (unlike our political leaders) has already addressed this prospect.

 

 

The moral? — We’re all in this together, although virtually no prominent politician wants to admit it

 

Global warming, and capitalism’s too easily externalized costs, highlight the tragedy of the (planetary) commons.

 

A colony of bees, herd of elephants, or school of porpoises might (metaphorically) cope with climate change and unnecessarily rapacious capitalism more foresightedly than we are.