{"id":3330,"date":"2009-08-09T20:12:55","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T00:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3330"},"modified":"2009-08-09T20:12:55","modified_gmt":"2009-08-10T00:12:55","slug":"global-warming-and-the-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/global-warming-and-the-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Warming and the Poor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wall Street Journal<\/a> | Bret Stephens | Aug. 5, 2009<\/p>\n

A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world\u2019s poor from the ravages of global warming. The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost.<\/p>\n

This spring, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, issued a report warning that \u201cmass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness\u201d would ensue if the world did not agree to \u201cthe most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated\u201d on global warming at a forthcoming conference in Copenhagen. <\/p>\n

According to Mr. Annan\u2019s report, climate change-induced disasters now account for 315,000 deaths each year and $125 billion in damages, numbers set to rise to 500,000 deaths and $340 billion in damages by 2030. The numbers are hotly contested by University of Colorado disaster-trends expert Roger Pielke Jr., who calls them a \u201cposter child for how to lie with statistics.\u201d <\/p>\n

But never mind about that. The more interesting kiss-off took place in New Delhi late last month, when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there was no way India would sign on to any global scheme to cap carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,\u201d Mr. Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton. \u201cAnd as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.\u201d The Chinese\u2014the world\u2019s largest emitter of CO\u2014have told the Obama administration essentially the same thing.<\/p>\n

Roughly 75% of Indians\u2014some 800 million people\u2014live on $2 a day or less, adjusted for purchasing power parity. In China, it\u2019s about 36%, or about 480 million. That means the two governments alone are responsible for one in every two people living at that income level.<\/p>\n

If climate change is the threat Mr. Annan claims it is, India and China ought to be eagerly beating the path to Copenhagen. So why aren\u2019t they? <\/p>\n

To listen to the climate alarmists, it\u2019s all America\u2019s fault. \u201cWhat the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model,\u201d wrote environmental writer Jacques Leslie last year in the Christian Science Monitor. \u201cThe United States passed up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China\u2019s economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and the loss is already incalculable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facts tell a different story. When Deng Xiaoping began introducing elements of a market economy in 1980, Chinese life expectancy at birth was 65.3 years. Today it is about 73 years. The numbers are probably a bit inflated, as most numbers are in the People\u2019s Republic, but the trend line is undeniable. In India, life expectancy rose from 52.5 years in 1980 to about 67 years today. If this is the consequence of following the \u201cAmerican economic model\u201d then poor countries need more of it.<\/p>\n

But what about all the pollution in India and particularly China? In Mr. Leslie\u2019s telling, CO emissions are part-and-parcel with common pollutants such as particulate matter, toxic waste, and everything else typically associated with a degraded environment. They\u2019re not. The U.S. and China produce equivalent quantities of carbon dioxide. But try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing\u2019s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can\u2019t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one.<\/p>\n

People who live in Third-World countries\u2014like Mexico, where I grew up\u2014tend to understand this, even if First-World environmentalists do not. People who live in oppressive Third World countries, like China, also understand that it isn\u2019t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.<\/p>\n

To return to Mr. Leslie, his complaint with China is that it has become too much of a consumer society, again in the American mold. Again he is ridiculous: China has one of the world\u2019s highest personal savings rates\u201450% versus the U.S.\u2019s 2.7%. The real source of China\u2019s pollution problem is a state-led industrial policy geared toward production, and state-owned enterprises (especially in \u201cdirty\u201d sectors like coal and steel) that strive to meet production quotas, and state-appointed managers who don\u2019t mind cutting corners in matters of safety or environmental responsibility, and typically have the political clout to insulate themselves from any public fallout.<\/p>\n

In other words, China\u2019s pollution problems are not a function of laissez-faire policies and rampant consumerism, but of the regime\u2019s excessive lingering control of the economy. A freer China means a cleaner China.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lesson in this for those who believe that the world\u2019s environmental problems call for a new era of dirigisme. And there ought to be a lesson for those who claim to understand the problems of the poor better than the poor themselves. If global warming really is the catastrophe the alarmists claim, the least they can do for its victims is not to patronize them while impoverishing them in the bargain.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wall Street Journal | Bret Stephens | Aug. 5, 2009 A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world\u2019s poor from the ravages of global warming. The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost. This spring, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, issued a report … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[75,38,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-warming","category-junk-science","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}