Too Late Schmardt

I think I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather made his living doing dialect humor. He and his vaudeville partner did an act portraying an Irishman and a “Dutchman”, i.e. German. Oddly, my grandfather who self-identified as Irish, played the Dutchman.

There’s an old wisecrack, done in dialect, of unknown provenance: “Too soon ve get oldt, too late schmardt.” I think that’s certainly the case in this Rolling Stone article on the challenge that China presents to any attempt at reducing the world’s output of carbon:

The blunt truth is that what China decides to do in the next decade will likely determine whether or not mankind can halt – or at least ameliorate – global warming. The view among a number of prominent climate scientists is that if China’s emissions peak around 2025, we may – just barely – have a shot at stabilizing the climate before all hell breaks loose. But the Chinese have resisted international pressure to curb their emissions. For years, they have used the argument that they are poor, the West is rich, and that the high levels of carbon in the atmosphere were caused by America’s and Europe’s 200-year-long fossil­fuel binge. Climate change is your problem, they argued – you deal with it. But that logic doesn’t hold anymore. China is set to become the largest economy in the world this year, and in 2006, it passed the U.S. as the planet’s largest carbon polluter. China now dumps 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That number is expected to grow to 15 billion tons by 2030, dwarfing the pollution of the rest of the world. If that happens, then the chances that the world will cut carbon pollution quickly enough to avert dangerous climate change is, according to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., “virtually zero.”

The one question I have about this article is how in the heck can you write an article about China and carbon production without mentioning that China has been adding 100 new 6 MW coal-fired power plants for the last decade? Just for comparison, on an annual basis the U. S. doesn’t add any. Maybe it’s there and I missed it. If so, it’s buried pretty well.

Ignore whether we should worry about carbon production. Just ignore it for the sake of argument. Can you write anything resembling a balanced article without mentioning the rate at which China’s production is increasing? Or its investment in infrastructure supporting that production?