George Will points to the elephant in the room on climate change: nobody wants to take the steps that might reverse the situation.
In Bonn, even thoroughly developed Japan promised only a 2 percent increase of its emission-reduction obligations under the 1997 Kyoto agreement. Japan’s decision left Yvo de Boer, the slow learner who is the U.N.’s climate change czar, nonplussed: “For the first time in my two and a half years in this job, I don’t know what to say.”
Others did. They said: On to Italy! The Financial Times reported, “Officials are now pinning their hopes” on the G-8 summit.
Which has come and gone, the eight having vowed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050, which is 41 years distant. As is 1968, which seems as remote as the Punic Wars, considering that more than half of all living Americans were born after 1966. If you do not want to do anything today, promise to do everything tomorrow, which is always a day away.
Still, sternly declaring that they will brook no nonsense from nature, the eight made a commitment — but a nonbinding one — that Earth’s temperature shall not rise by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over “preindustrial levels.” That is the goal. Details to follow. Tomorrow.
Explaining such lethargy in the face of a supposed emergency, the G-8’s host, Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said the eight should not burden themselves as long as “5 billion people continue to behave as they have always behaved.” Actually, the problem, for people who think it is a problem, is that the 5 billion in the developing world are behaving in a new way. After centuries of exclusion from economic growth, they are enjoying it, which is tiresome to would-be climate fixers in already prosperous nations.
If China and India refuse to reduce their production of carbon (and they do), no actions on our part including sitting in unheated caves and eating our food raw will prevent whatever climate change due to carbon dioxide is occurring from occurring.
Note, especially, the graphic above (click on it for a larger image). Even the EU countries that agreed to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide under the Kyoto Protocol have increased their emissions.
BTW, don’t blame me for the United States’s behavior. I drive less than 5,000 miles a year, I almost never fly, and I’ve used less energy in my home and business every year for the last 15 years. I’ve opposed expanding highways (probably the greatest systemic driver for increased carbon emissions) and as long ago as 40 years ago I opposed the Luddites who successfully stopped nuclear power plant construction in the United States. Whatever the problems with nuclear power, if we hadn’t done that, our carbon emissions today would be dramatically lower than they are now.
Unfortunately, my take on the Luddites, many of whom are in the forefront of those arguing for idiotic, ineffectual, or draconian measures to reduce carbon emissions in the United States, is that climate change is merely the latest pretext for their opposition to technology. First, it was overpopulation. Then global cooling. Not it’s global warming which is being rechristened “climate change”. They’re all other words for hating technology.
They’d best get used to it. To whatever degree climate change, anthropogenic or no, is a problem, it’s a problem that will be addressed by technology. It’s almost undoubtedly true that healing the world will be more cost effective than preventing it from getting sick in the first place since the steps for doing that are beyond us. That will require the hated technology.
Update
Coincidentally the Atlantic has an article on this very subject today.
Who are these “luddites” you are talking about? I’ve only seen a handful of people seriously calling for “small is beautiful” and other proposals, and very few people take them seriously. Much larger is the group of people who are rightfully concerned about the climate change problem, but don’t have the unity to politically push for proposals like greater nuclear power and a carbon tax.
Having taken a look at some of the projections of effects resulting from various rises of CO2 levels in the latest IPCC report, I respectfully disagree it. It’s like a fat man who has lived on nothing but junk food his entire life being warned that there are consequences ahead and he’d better shape up, and then complaining that shaping up is “too hard” and he’ll instead risk heart attacks and diabetes in the hopes that medical science will invent a magic pill to prevent heart attacks and diabetes at some unknown point in the future.
Just as in preventive medicine if the patient simply won’t or can’t conform to the program that the physician advises, the physician is wasting his breath. While doing without might be a perfectly good solution it’s not one that most people whether here on in China will adhere to.
As I noted above I barely drive and my thermostat is set to 58°F in the winter. I don’t expect everybody to follow suit and, failing that and without the political will to abandon perverse incentives, finding technological solutions certainly seems to me to be the only recourse.
Of course, and to be honest, I don’t particularly give good odds to any effort to try and kill global warming before it gets above the 2 degrees Celsius point. That doesn’t mean that I see preventive efforts on it as inherently wrong or foolish – it’s more of a fatalistic reaction on my part.
I hate it, since it means that we’ll probably end up with some serious problems mid-to-late century and we’ll be kicking ourselves over not doing anything earlier. Of course, the (cruel) joke will be on the Indians and Chinese if the Himalayan glaciers collapse at some point due to temperature rise in those areas, and the various rivers they’re dependent on drop off in volume.
I don’t want to get into a AGW debate. I’m officially bored, and its just the biggest hoax ever.
That said, the practical issue is the one Will cites. Nobody in India or China is going to go along. And their CO2 emissions will dwarf any effort we attempt, except a massive nuclear energy push.
Wake me up when the greens go berserk for nuclear, and not for returning to GEICO pitch men lifestyles……….