Four Claims

As I read this post from NPR, imagining a low carbon emissions future, I was impressed at what a thorough-going work of fantasy it was. It’s a pleasant fantasy but a fantasy nonetheless. You can read it if you care to. It’s very attractively presented.

In response I’m going to make four claims about carbon emissions. Rather than attempting to prove them, I’ll just suggest why I believe them to be true.

It doesn’t much matter what we do here.

There are many things we can do here. We can commute less. We can build less. We can use energy more efficiently. Unfortunately, none of those will actually solve the problem that people are complaining about. We can reduce U. S. carbon emissions to zero and, assuming that the models are correct, the effect on climate change will be negligible. This is the reason:

What does matter is what China, India, and, increasingly, the countries of Africa do.

It doesn’t much matter what ordinary people in the U. S. do.

I’ve posted on this extensively. Carbon emissions rise geometrically with income. Mark Zuckerberg’s 5,600 square foot home doesn’t require twice as many carbon emissions as the average home it requires a lot more than that. Add his flying around the country via jet and all of the other ways in which he causes carbon emissions and you’ll see what I mean. The implication of this is that the results of market-based strategies for reducing emissions will be disappointing.

We will need heavy industry for the foreseeable future.

Here’s just one example. Millions of people require insulin to live. Consider the industrial process by which artificial insulin is created. Here’s a production plant for the production of artificial insulin:

That’s heavy industry. It takes steel and power and people commuting to work. We won’t locate insulin-production plants in midtown Manhattan or in the Loop in Chicago. “Urbanization” is a fantasy. Moving insulin production to India won’t help. It will just be out of our sight and beyond our control. If India’s approach to heavy industry produces more carbon emissions than ours does, that will actually produce more emissions. Multiply insulin by the tens of thousands of other similar products on which our lives depend.

Too many of our policies over the last half century have been counter-productive.

We have subsidized road construction, home-building, and offshoring our manufacturing to places where it is safely out of sight and beyond our control. All of these things increase carbon emissions beyond what they otherwise would have been. These policies are popular which is why they’re likely to continue.