I found Rahul Tongla’s piece at Brookings on the unfairness of pushing poor countries to reduce their carbon emissions aggravating for a number of reasons. Here’s the kernel of the piece:
The poor need more energy, and much of it will be clean energy which is already viable. It’s the last fraction of energy that is hard to keep fossil-free. It can be done – at a cost. That cost should disproportionally be borne by the rich, first as they go full zero and pay the early adopter premium, and second, through financial support for developing nations. The premium is important, not just to cover the cost of developing batteries, but also for green hydrogen to avoid industrial emissions.
Such support should be part of promised aid or concessional finance and certainly not more traditional debt. At COP15 in 2009, there was a pledge to provide $100 billion of annual climate support for the poor by 2020, but the form such support would take was never specified. Sadly, the pledged funds haven’t yet fully materialized, and the date has since been pushed back to 2023.
Many developing countries are asking for funds due to climate-related “loss and damage.†How much materializes remains to be seen. Regardless of what form it takes, all climate finance support should be flexible, allowing recipients to not just mitigate their emissions, but also pay towards adaptation and resilience.
I found it aggravating for a number of reasons. Let’s assume that carbon emissions are a risk (I do). Per capita carbon emissions are a red herring—they’re simply irrelevant. It’s the total amount of carbon emitted that drives climate change not the per capita carbon emissions.
All that is necessary to render anything the United States might do in reducing carbon emissions meaningless is for China and India to continue to increase their own carbon emissions. And that doesn’t even take Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. into account. Consequently, if the strategy for dealing with whatever impact carbon emissions have on the climate is solely by limiting what we emit, it’s doomed to failure. It’s not the right strategy. Either the poorer countries must reduce their carbon emissions or a different strategy should be pursued.
That’s why I think the smart strategy is, yes, reduce our carbon emissions as is practicable by using wind, solar, and nuclear as appropriate but concurrently pursue carbon capture and sequestration. Don’t put all of our climate eggs in the renewables basket.
A second reason I found the article frustrating was this remark:
First, if all carbon is equal, then we cannot ignore historically accumulated carbon.
If we’re going to consider historic carbon emissions, shouldn’t we also take the historic failure to remove carbon from the atmosphere represented by deforestation into account? Poor countries are among the heavyweight champions in deforestation, China and India in particular.
Finally, every time I hear pleas for assistance from richer countries to help poorer countries reduce their carbon emissions it reminds me of a remark about foreign aid: foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. Let’s be pragmatic about it. Such assistance will inevitably result in payments to enable the highest-emitting individuals in poor countries to emit even more carbon while in all likelihood doing nothing to reduce their countries’ carbon emissions. No such plan should be undertaken without considerable oversight and I suspect the oversight itself will be intolerable.
“All that is necessary to render anything the United States might do in reducing carbon emissions meaningless is for China and India to continue to increase their own carbon emissions.”
No, what we do still counts. If total CO2 is the metric then if India and China make too much and so do we, then total CO2 is even higher.
I would generally oppose sending poorer countries money for this. What we should be doing is investing in the research that will make carbon capture and renewables cheaper. We already do this some and renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels in some places but the tech is new. Lots of potential good stuff possibly on the way but it needs acceleration.
Steve
“No, what we do still counts. If total CO2 is the metric then if India and China make too much and so do we, then total CO2 is even higher.”
That’s far too simplistic.
India and China keep barreling along in manufacturing and mining/refining activities to the detriment of US general economic, worker and strategic interests, and have been eviscerating our country for years. They do it because they capture the benefits and simply don’t care about CO2. Therefore, they will keep barreling along, even as we commit national suicide. And further, since these CO2 producing activities are going to occur no matter what (and probably with a worse environmental outcome in India and China) there is no benefit to the global environment.
I don’ think man made global warming, if it exists, stops at the Indian and Chinese borders……
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267233/renewable-energy-capacity-worldwide-by-country/
On India….”As of July 2022, India’s installed renewable energy capacity (including hydro) stood at 161.28 GW, representing 39.91% of the overall installed power capacity.
The country is targeting about 450 Gigawatt (GW) of installed renewable energy capacity by 2030 – about 280 GW (over 60%) is expected from solar.
The non-hydro renewable energy capacity addition stood at 4.2 GW for the first three months of FY23 against 2.6 GW for the first three months of FY22.
Solar power installed capacity has increased by more than 18 times, from 2.63 GW in March 2014 to 49.3 GW at the end of 2021. In FY22, till December 2021, India has added 7.4GW of solar power capacity, up 335% from 1.73 GW in the previous year. Off-grid solar power is growing at a fast pace in India, with sales of 392,000 off-grid solar products in the first half of 2021.
Power generation from renewable energy sources (not including hydro) stood at 18.99 billion units (BU) in July 2022, up from 16.61 BU in July 2021.”
From IBEF.
Steve
Ain’t gonna be pretty when younger Americans find out the elite warmers been playing them for financial reasons.
They are not good people, they mock us with every breath.
Bastards bleed red too, bros.
You do realize that’s just pure obfuscation, right steve?
India has something like 300 coal fired plants, with something like 75 in construction or pre-construction. They generate the majority of their grid power from coal and have huge reserves. Take a look at this graph, with CO2 emissions rising at exponentail rates.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india#what-are-the-country-s-annual-co2-emissions
Does that look like a country that is controlling its CO2 emissions?
If you navigate to the page to which Drew linked, it allows you to add China and the U. S. which illustrates the point I made. We could reduce our emissions to zero and at China and India’s present rate of increase global climate change would still be disastrous.
The reasonable alternatives are to reject the premise (carbon emissions are a risk) or conclude that China and India’s emissions are a significant problem.
Meh. I think this is more of the typical nonsense where if people who think climate change is real down wear sackcloth and bicycle everywhere they are hypocrites and therefore climate change is not real.
India has clearly been lagging even China in development but it is now being some real growth. They need tons more energy. I dont expect them to wait until that can all be renewable. I dont expect that many countries will achieve 100% renewables for a long time anyway. Lets exclude Iceland, Denmark, Uruguay etc. So India is adding both coal and renewables. Per their own sources they are adding renewables faster. Up until the last few years coal would be cheaper (excluding externalities) so even being as far along as they are shows a lot of commitment, or foresight. Also, when you expand the graph at that site it looks like emissions, or at least the rate of increase may have peaked around 2012.
So what we really have is India and China with a lot of both renewables and coal but renewables expanding faster. On top of that the cost of renewables has continued to drop pretty fast. Of course your response 15 years ago was that we couldn’t count on that, same as 10 years ago, same as 5 years ago, same as last week. And we are making the advances against resistance from those who dont think climate change is real.
Steve
Even the Climate Change Czar, John Kerry, admitted that the US could go to carbon zero, and it wouldn’t matter if China, India, and others didn’t follow suit. And “wouldn’t matter” means avoiding the predicted effects of CO2 increases.
While that is true the evidence is that both China and India are making major efforts.
Steve
To my eye they’re doing what I said we should be doing: use wind and solar where appropriate but don’t let it get in the way of development.
BTW I’ve got a chart somewhere on Germany’s adoption of EVs over time. The news isn’t particularly good.
wouldn’t matter if China, India, and others didn’t follow suit:
But if they don’t, it could be considered a crime against humanity, carbon based WMDs, and an act of war.
We would be obligated to lead a coalition against noncompliance.
It’s a real threat? Right?
Of course, all the brouhaha only matters if climate change is dangerous. The models predict almost all the increase in temperature would occur in high northern latitudes, because the oceans buffer the tropics and southern latitudes and most land is in the north. That means Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, and Greenland. The result would be the addition of something 10 million square miles of habitable land area, a good deal of it arable: tundra to steppe.
In order to prevent the addition of that much land, our delusional Rulers want to de-industrialize and even de-agriculturalize our economies. The ultimate goal is de-population and a medieval/feudal economy. The Rulers live like kings, literally.
So far, 30 years of heavy investment in renewables has reduced the fossil fuel share of our energy production from about 82% to 81%, or so. Coal consumption in particular is expanding, as are all other fossil fuels.
The Germans were cutting down ancient old growth forests to use as wood fuel. Lately they’ve been tearing down wind turbines to dig for the coal underneath them.
I remind you of the excellent analyses done over at Manhattan Contrarian. Total electrification of our economy using renewables would require an investment of several GDP’s. In the case of the US, that is about $100 TRILLION. $100,000,000,000,000. The chief cost is batteries, but the total generating and distribution capacity of the system needs to be at least tripled. This is not a one-off expense. The amortization period for solar panels, turbines, transformers, batteries is about 5 to 10 years. E. g., batteries for EV’s are warranted for about 8 years or 100,000 miles, after which they must be replaced. So the annual expense for replacements is about $10 trillion to $20 trillion, one-half to one whole GDP.
As William Briggs (“statistician to the stars”) says, AGW is the greatest scientific hoax of all time.
Of course, US/NATO is driving the world towards nuclear war, so maybe it all doesn’t matter.
Should we weep or laugh?
PS. We are recovering from the Little Ice Age. Current temperatures are about those of the 1930’s, or cooler. Global temperatures were warmer during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, warmer still during the Roman expansion, yet warmer during the Minoan Age, and warmest during the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago. The long-term temperature trend is down.
Here is China
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/chinas-carbon-dioxide-emissions-more-than-twice-those-of-the-u-s/
Steve – he who reads technical papers better than the Average American (snicker) Dave’s point, and my point, revolve around the concept of a dominating variable, vs second and third order effects.
China and India (as Dave points out, may be using renewables where appropriate) are just like a locomotive out of control. Their growth and need for fossil fuels just dominates any actions we take – while we commit industrial and strategic suicide removing thimblefuls of water from a boat in a hurricane. You can cite renewables growth all you want, but a 1KW increase to 2KW may be a 100% increase, but it means jack squat.
“Thinking” (heh) like yours is why the Dems are going to get slaughtered next week.
“We are recovering from the Little Ice Age. Current temperatures are about those of the 1930’s, or cooler. Global temperatures were warmer during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, warmer still during the Roman expansion, yet warmer during the Minoan Age, and warmest during the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago. The long-term temperature trend is down.”
Exactly. The global warmists are arrogant enough to select dates that fit their narrative. I tried pointing this out a couple months ago, but it falls on deaf ears. Talk about cultists. (That’s you, steve)
Its all about a minimalist/anti-capitalist/carbon: the mother of all taxable items agenda. Even those who are true believers, but sensible, (see: Lundborg) know the cultists have completely lost their minds.
“While that is true the evidence is that both China and India are making major efforts.”
I guess that depends. At the end of the day, their carbon output is growing much higher every year. If you believe the expectations about future effects then their “major efforts” are slightly delaying those effects.
The point is that the future effects of climate change no longer primarily depend on what Europe and the US do. And the notion that countries that are still developing like China and India can do so only using clean energy sources is contradicted by the reality of what they are actually doing as well as the various limitations of “green” energy sources. While it’s great they are installing solar and other renewables it’s not enough to avoid the consequences the experts predict are coming.
The global warmists are arrogant enough to select dates that fit their narrative. I tried pointing this out a couple months ago, but it falls on deaf ears. Talk about cultists.
Global warmists not only select dates to affirm their narrative, but also select studies and climatologists who are on the same page, while rejecting those who show data and analysis that refutes the warmists position. The same distortions and false narratives are pervasive in the globalist community (WHO, WEF) in relaying honest medical information, especially involving the latest “pandemic.â€
https://reason.com/2022/11/02/driving-electric-cars-produces-little-carbon-making-the-batteries-produces-a-lot/
There will be a much more convincing argument when most EV batteries aren’t produced in China. I may not live to see that. An entire supply chain would need to be created and at present there are no signs of that happening. I think that such a supply chain is a prerequisite. The Powers-That-Be don’t seem to see it that way.
““We are recovering from the Little Ice Age. Current temperatures are about those of the 1930’s, or cooler. Global temperatures were warmer during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, warmer still during the Roman expansion, yet warmer during the Minoan Age, and warmest during the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago. The long-term temperature trend is down.—
Factually false. People believe this because there was a spike in US temps in the 30s but the US accounts for only about 2% of global surface area. This is one of the reasons it is hard to talk science with conservatives. They believe and repeat the same wrong stuff that is easy to check on if they wanted.
Steve