Making China Part of the Solution
The atmosphere is a global phenomenon, so controlling climate pollution is a global issue that requires a global solution. That means China needs to be part of the solution. But currently, the Chinese policy framework is pointing in a very different direction. That leads Paul Krugman to advocate a punitive carbon tariff on Chinese goods to bring them to heel.
I think it’s fine to have something along these lines in the mix of discussions to try to bring them along, but I think this is a pretty unsound conclusion. In reaching this, I think one advantage I have over Krugman is that I’ve never been to China and have never discussed this matter with any Chinese policymakers or business figures. Krugman has and has reached the conclusion based on those discussions that China will never come around voluntarily. James Fallows has also talked to Chinese people and says they tell him something different. I’ve talked to various people who’ve talked to Chinese officials, and the things they say vary. Being personally ignorant, it’s easy for me to adopt the meta-rational stance and conclude that the state of Chinese thinking about this issue is unclear and probably somewhat conflicted.
The bottom line about the international aspects of climate change is that the very idea of an effective response assumes the existence of a generally cooperative international environment. It doesn’t assume the non-existence of the odd “rogue” state here or there, but it assumes the absence of any kind of serious great power rivalries. Not just China, but also India and probably Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia as well are going to need to cooperate in a serious way with the OECD nations on this. And I just don’t see how you’re going to get where you need to get through coercion. If anything, I think attempted economic coercion of China is more likely to wind up breaking down solidarity between the US, EU, and Japan than anything else. First, we impose our carbon tariff. Then suddenly Airbus and European car companies are getting all kinds of sales because the EU hasn’t followed suit. Now not only are the Chinese mad at us, we’re mad at the Europeans. Optimistically, at this point everyone decides coercion is unworkable and we start to back away.
Tyler Cowen says we should remember “this problem is really bad and that means a lot of what we are tempted to do could make it even worse.”
49 Responses to “Making China Part of the Solution”
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Read ‘Bound to Burn’ in the City Journal.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:12 am
by Peter W. Huber. Google is your friend. This is a must read. It is not a must agree with, but you’re going to out to lunch if you don’t at least understand his message.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Here’s the thing, Matt: the amount of stuff being manufactured in China for the US and Europe is a serious problem, because in outsourcing our manufacturing, we’re outsourcing our greenhouse gas emissions. So if you look at the UK in isolation, it seems to have reduced emissions 18 percent since 1990 – but if you factor in all the stuff China’s making on Britain’s behalf, the UK’s emissions have increased by 20 percent.
There needs to be some way to apply the cost of the pollution being outsourced to China if China’s not willing to do so, and a carbon tariff is the first idea I’ve heard of that might do anything along those lines. We also can’t expect China to get on board with climate legislation out of the goodness of their hearts – something like this needs to be in the toolbox.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:20 am
And in this matter I agree with Matt, and disagree with Paul. It is bad enough that we have a Cap and Trade bill that takes from the poor and powerless and gives to the rich and powerful. Carbon encumbering is probably completely unnecessary, it is viciously regressive, it is highly expensive, and dangerous and lethal to the poor of this earth, presently living on the margin.
It is the height of arrogance to believe we can effect the governments of the third world countries, now struggling to raise the standard of living of their poorest. Those governments face revolution if they hold down the poor unnecessarily, as the coming cooling of the globe will demonstrate. The Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians are perfectly aware that the globe is cooling, and that CO2’s role in climate has been exaggerated. They intend to use misplaced western guilt about past energy use to further hamper Europe and the US in the world’s markets. So we savage markets and our own nation for the precious conceit of a Western elite? Yeah, it seems to be happening.
I’m particularly amused by a commenter over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, who said so what if the Chinese stop buying our debt, someone else will. He apparently hasn’t noticed that our own government is now buying the otherwise onsold portions of the Treasury offering, thereby monetizing the debt, and destroying our currency. This is happening now, folks, for how long, even kim doesn’t know.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am
By the way, just to be pre-emptive, I disclaim expertise in economics. I do know enough to know that trade wars hurt everybody. And for what? To demonize carbon, whose effect is too weak to warm a cooling globe? Give me a break.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Re kim
Mr. kim really is an amusing fellow. He now cites Peter Huber as his expert on climate science. Dr.Huber is nothing but a shill for big corporations. Mr. kim prattles on about his concern for the poor in third world countries. Apparently, his concern stops at the door of big corporations that prey on those same poor and are facilitated by propagandists like Dr. Huber. I would recommend to interested readers the thread on sourcewatch about Dr. Huber which totally discredits him as a disinterested scientific observer.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Peter_W._Huber
May 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
I took Krugman’s main point to be that WE must do something on climate change in order to have the moral authority to press China and other developing nations to do the same. Tarrifs might be part of the appropriate policy mix at some point down the line, but not for a long while yet, and hopefully never.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
kim may be naive when it comes to economics, but this person sure knows how to hit the comment button. 4 out of the first 5 comments? What, didn’t have anything better to do today?
strasmangelo jones’ point is a very good one. How much stuff does China produce for the US? Factoring that in, how much has our CO2 consumption increased, compared to just the US emissions. I know we haven’t decreased, so it must be something rather high.
I wonder what would happen if we slapped punitive tariffs on Chinese imports. China’s dependent on us for imports, the rest of the world couldn’t absorb the difference. Perhaps China would try to call in some favors concerning the amount of debt they hold? Doubtful, but who knows. They seem loathe to do anything that would restrict economic growth.
One thing’s for sure: the US needs to be a leader on energy efficiency, and we need to help developing countries employ less carbon-intensive methods to produce all the crap we buy from them.
Fun game: try to go a day without buying anything made in China. Then try to go a week. Tough, isn’t it?
May 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
SLC, 6. Ad homs are ‘junk rhetoric’, SLC. You must refute what Huber has to say, not attack the messenger.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Jasper: that’s very true. We must do something, because we’re the market for China. If our importers were to demand better quality production methods, the Chinese would get right on it, provided we pay for it. But we don’t, and they continue to give us what we want.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Jasper, 7. Nice point, and presumably we don’t have ‘moral authority’ now because of implied guilt about past carbon use. The solution to the dilemma, as is often the case, is right through the horns of it. We have no need for guilt about past CO2 production, because CO2 truly only has a minimal role in climate regulation. See the present and future falling global temperatures in the face of rising carbon dioxide. CO2 is pusillanimous. Get over your guilt and your fears. You are being manipulated, and the results of your acquiescence in that manipulation is increased hard times for the poor. Surely, you can’t be for that, can you?
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:49 am
jeremy, 8. You can relax; this is primarily an economic thread and I don’t have a lot to add. Peter Huber says what I would say but much more eloquently. And no, I don’t have anything better to do today, but I’ve better places to say it. Adios.
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May 16th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I think we are way too skittish of stepping on China’s toes.
Krugman is absolutely right.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Wait — some poster comes on here, posts some absurdly huge claims about CO2 not playing a large role in GW based on a source he throws in, then it’s our responsibility to refute his source? Really?
May 16th, 2009 at 10:59 am
I think before we start talking about tariffs on carbon we should think about how to shoot Senator Inhofe out of a cannon. No I don’t think violence against Republican senators is a good idea, but it seems pretty crazy to talk about tariffs on the Chinese when we can’t even get our own government to do the right thing. We have domestic political forces that resist change and there is no reason to think China is any different. What we really need to do is to weaken the current set of vested interests in our countires and create new constituencies for low carbon energy and energy efficient technologies.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:01 am
#14: No, it’s our duty to ignore him.
#13: Perhaps, but we must accept that we are the reason China is the way it is today. If we want them to change, we need to ask them to do things differently. ‘Ask’ meaning: pay them to do it how we want. China gives us what we want. Right now, what we seem to want is cheap crap at obscenely low prices. What we should be pushing for is properly produced crap at relatively low prices.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Wanna know how the Chinese will respond to the Church of Global Warming?
Three Gorges Dam is how.
By which I mean “Screw the EnviroNuts!”
Hey, soon Jodie Foster will be narrating a soothing infomercial about how it has been a bit cool anyway!
Meanwhile India is about to put a gasaholic in every hut.
Not to mention that the entire Third World is going to go Chinese as quickly as possible.
That is what is so pathetic about the Sky is Falling wackos:
So What?
No nation on earth is going to make the sacrifices that the Warming Wackos claim are necessary to stop much less reverse Global Warming fallout. No not even the Scandis.
Which reveals the Junk Science for what it is: just another exercise in social engineering by the Lefties, just another reason to steal money so they don’t have to do something useful like work.
By the way last week they figured that the sea ice models were fucked and overstated the problem by 300%.
What did the EnviroNazis have to say?
“Nothing to see here, move right along!”
In the next few years more and more of the “scientists” will be proven to have lied and jiggered the books on warming.
It’s just like Bush and Iraq.
Or Pelosi and torture.
Or ObaFuckhead and freedom.
You gotta love ‘em!
May 16th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Shorter JT: “Raaar! I’m an angry man! Look at me!!!”
May 16th, 2009 at 11:11 am
JT doesn’t seem to understand that preventing Global Warming isn’t a binary thing. The more CO2 we put into the atmosphere the worse things are going to get. An increase in global temperatures of 3 degrees celcius will be bad but and increas of 7 degrees celcius will be much worse.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Matthew’s point seems to be that in developing policy in this area, we should stay ignorant of actual real-world geopolitics and “optimistically” pretend things are other than than they are. He literally says his “advantage” is his ignorance and he is advocating that that ignorance be more widespread among opinion makers, thereby disseminated downward, so as to reach the sort of policy outcome Matthew favors (whose effectiveness will, Matthew tacitly acknowledges, be hindered by the sort of real-world factors Matthew advocates ignoring away).
So this is what you guys’ve been meaning by “reality-based community”.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Krugman starts his article with “I have seen the future” and ends with “it’s time to save the planet”. These are demented ideas and he should be ignored.
What can we do to convince the Chinese to adopt nuclear power?
May 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
The good news is that the bulk of chinas CO2 pollution stems from its electricity production, rather than, say, its trasportation sector – this makes it much, much easier to fix. Basically, all that is nessesary is that we talk them into building a nuclear power plant a week instead of what they are doing now – IE: building another coal power plant every week, and the problem goes away. Okay, thats a lot of reactors, but china has a lot of construction workers, so..
May 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
One bit I would recommend is a lecture by Gwynne Dyer on TVO’s Big Ideas: http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?bi?1241899200000
He’s got a great explanation of what’s wrong and the consequences, starting from an assessment done by the Pentagon. Dyer wrote a book called “Climate Wars”. I imagine it’s quite good.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
@18: love it, but you missed one detail. It should be
“Raaar! I’m An AngryMan! Look At Me.”
May 16th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I agree that this is a fixable problem. And to some extent it’s a problem for the future. When our per capita emissions are equal to China’s, then I’ll start to worry that the Chinese are getting a free ride. As long as we’re way above them, per capita, I see the domestic part of the equation as the political bottleneck.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
What you forget is this: The Chinese govt (for millenias now) fears popular uprisings. A lot. So any policy that would have the effect of raising costs to the average Chinese person – and increasing the risk of higher unemployment and more social unrest – is going to be looked at darkly over there.
Making energy more expensive would do exactly that. The Chinese govt fears popular unrest (something they can see signs of immediately) a heck of a lot more than they fear the umbrage of people like Matt, or of some nebulous future problem that may well not come to pass.
We’re far more likely to get a trade war than anything else at this point. We’ve started them with Canada and Mexico already; I can’t see the administration stopping one with China.
A couple of years from now, after the Congress’ foreign policy ideas get put into place, we’ll probably look back fondly on the early 2000’s as a comparative era of good feelings…
May 16th, 2009 at 11:33 am
#24: You’re correct. I should properly give credit to Rock, Paper, Shotgun and call JT an Angry Internet Man.
#22: While that’s true, we also have to take into account all the downsides that come with nuclear power: namely cost (they aren’t going to foot the bill themselves), security, and fuel. While nuclear may be better off than coal CO2-wise, it’s still limited by the fuel available. Not to mention China’s not the best country for industrial safety, if a Chernobyl happens, I could definitely see it happening in China. Here in Japan, about 4 or 5 years ago, several maintenance workers were parboiled to death because the company slacked off on checking the pipes and some burst.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Ultimately China has as much substantive interest in preventing global warming as we do. The question is whether its political institutions or our own political institutions are capable of adressing this issue intelligently and working with one another cooperatively. We have only had a few months in which we have been clear to the Chinese that their CO2 emissions will be a problem for our relationship, we need to be patient and give them time to absorb this new reality. After all even with Obama in the Whitehouse it will be several years before the US is doing anything meaningful about out own emissions, we can’t really expect the Chinese to do better.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
#25: One of the arguments Dyer makes (see the link in my comment #23) is that we really have no business telling anyone else how to act, especially given our attitude over the past 8 years, when we knew we were bad but still continued. 3/4 of the CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution have occurred since 1945, under our hegemony. And we Americans are directly responsible for at least 1/4 of those. Basically, Dyer thinks we’re fuct.
#26: Very true. The question is, what can we do to make the Chinese government fear us more than an uprising? If we can get Japan and the EU to work with us, we can connect ourselves with the potential for an uprising and force China to change ways. Frankly, I think we’re going to have to spend a lot of money and give a lot of technology for free to China in order to avoid the worst of catastrophes.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Jeremy, 29. You can forget Japan. Quite recently their governmental organization tasked with exploring the matter basically came out and proclaimed the CO2=AGW paradigm a hoax. Officially, Japan’s government is now among the skeptics.
El Cid, 14. So you think ad homs are persuasive? And it’s obvious you haven’t read ‘Bound to Burn’. Huber’s theme isn’t climate skepticism, it’s realism that fossil fuels cannot be replaced easily or soon. Read up before you spout off. Oh, wait, this is the internet.
I try to leave and they drag me back in.
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May 16th, 2009 at 11:49 am
What can we do to convince the Chinese to adopt nuclear power?\
The Chinese have pretty much bought out the capacity of nuclear production for two decades to come. The machine tooling, the forms, You don’t know what you are talking about.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I think Matt ignores the political realities here at home, not to mention the economic incentives for China. Without at least the threat of Carbon tariffs I think serious increases in US carbon prices are politically and economically unsustainable. The more we try to do the greater the economic incentive to off shore one’s carbon usage, how do you think that will play at the next plant closing in Ohio post Cap-n-Trade?
If I were a betting man I’d place money on a tariff option being placed in the bill that would require some sort of certification by the exec branch.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Ed Marshall, 31. You are dead right. And if there is going to be a technology transfer it will be from them to us about pebble bed reactors. They are way ahead of the rest of the world in these reactors, which are easily scalable, cannot melt down, and don’t use the highly reactive chemical, H2O, to transfer energy. They will be franchising these units all over the world, and recovering the pebbles for reprocessing. They won’t argue for decades over Yucca Mountains and fail to resolve the issue, either.
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May 16th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Re kim
I suggest that Mr. kim go on over to the site I linked to before he accuses people of ad hominums. Showing that someone has no credibility on a particular subject is not an ad hominum attack. I find the sourcewatch writeup on Dr. Huber to be devastating. But, apparently, phonies like Anthony Watts and Dr. Huber is the best that Mr. kim can do.
By the way, it is also amusing to see Mr. kim repeating the big lie over and over again that we are experiencing global cooling. This approach was best described by the late and unlamented Josef Goebbels: if you want to tell a lie, make it a big one, tell it loudly, and tell it often and eventually people will believe it.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
SLC, 34. My point is that you have attacked Huber with what is essentially an ad hominem; you haven’t even read his ideas in ‘Bound to Burn’ let alone refuted them.
And it is not a ‘Big Lie’ that the globe is cooling. All of the temperature series, including Jim Hansen’s, show cooling for the last four or five years. The most important one, because of the large heat content of the ocean, is Josh Willis’s Argos oceanic buoy series. The UAH and RSS satellite tropospheric temperatures are also very reliable. The surface based ones, HadCru, and GISS are less reliable because of measurement concerns, but even they show the cooling. Friend, the big boys and girls have moved on from disputing that the globe is cooling to arguing that the trend is too short to be meaningful. Well, because of the oceanic oscillations having just flipped to their cooling phase, there is an excellent argument that the cooling will continue for 20 years or more. The alarmists have only the vain hope that warming will return ‘any minute now’. They have only their forlorn and failed models to back them up.
There has been a ‘Big Lie’ about climate, but it hasn’t come from the skeptics.
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May 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The Chinese have pretty much bought out the capacity of nuclear production for two decades to come. The machine tooling, the forms, You don’t know what you are talking about.
Yes, it’s true. I don’t know much about the Chinese commitment to nuclear energy. Please enlighten me about the inherent difficulty in building more tools and forms, in this country or elsewhere. This hardly seems as though it would be an insurmountable problem. Why have we in the US allowed countries like France and China to surpass us in the development of clean energy alternatives?
May 16th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
If America put tariffs on Chinese goods for carbon, China would rightly consider that unfair and retaliate.
But suppose the EU threatened to put tariffs on BOTH American and Chinese goods, as well as a long list of our countries that refused to restrict carbon? If the problem here is that American hands are too dirty to fix this problem, maybe we should let other countries take the lead here.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Kim: Have you ever looked at the curve of global temperature over the last 129 years? When you get around to doing that, if you can pull yourself away from the radio, and Rush Limbaugh’s show, you’ll see that the increase in global temperature is not a straight line up.
Due most likely to aerosol clouds, formed from pollution, the global temp. flat-lined from 1940 to 1980. Then it took off again, as we put scrubbers on our smoke stacks, and cat. converters on our vehicles. Had it not been for that lull, the temp. now would be much higher than it is. The pollution protected us. I think the same thing is happening now, from the pollution from China, India, Mexico, etc. There is data to back that up.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Jack, 38. Sorry, way ahead of you. A study by Tsonis et al, of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee explains the temperature vagaries of the past century by a coupling and uncoupling of natural climate cycles, primarily the oceanic oscillations. These are overlaid on rising temperatures since the end of the Little Ice Age, and which preceded the rise in CO2. The temperature curve only well matches the CO2 curve for the last quarter of the last century, a correlation which is co-incidental and not causal. And that has caused all the trouble, a great big fat Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. Oh, and you commentary about pollution effecting the albedo and cooling the earth from the 40’s to the 70’s is based on inadequate data pushed by the IPCC to explain dropping temperatures while CO2 rose. The relationship of temperature to oceanic oscillations is much more compelling.
Just Karl, 36. My understanding is that only one firm in the world, in Japan, is presently making the re-inforced boilers necessary for nuclear reactors. The Chinese are building nuclear reactors as fast as they can, and lead the world in pebble bed nuclear reactor technology, by a lot.
And you do know what you are talking about with respect to Paul Krugman, a competent economist who has let his political ideology pervert his work.
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May 16th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Who needs science? The brave new world will be led by Kim and it’s ExxonMobil funded troop of brave dissidents speaking truth to academic power and exposing the massive conspiracy of crypto-primitivist climatologists trying to keep us down with the implausible theory that changing the chemistry of the atmosphere would change the way the thing works.
May 16th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Politically, Krugman’s idea could be a game changer in the US, uniting environmentalists; labor and right-wing nationalists such as Pat Buchanan.
May 16th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
[...] Matt Y has a post up on the subject, with links to other posts: The bottom line about the international aspects of climate change is that the very idea of an effective response assumes the existence of a generally cooperative international environment. It doesn’t assume the non-existence of the odd “rogue” state here or there, but it assumes the absence of any kind of serious great power rivalries. Not just China, but also India and probably Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia as well are going to need to cooperate in a serious way with the OECD nations on this. And I just don’t see how you’re going to get where you need to get through coercion. If anything, I think attempted economic coercion of China is more likely to wind up breaking down solidarity between the US, EU, and Japan than anything else. First, we impose our carbon tariff. Then suddenly Airbus and European car companies are getting all kinds of sales because the EU hasn’t followed suit. Now not only are the Chinese mad at us, we’re mad at the Europeans. Optimistically, at this point everyone decides coercion is unworkable and we start to back away. [...]
May 16th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
China plans to derive 20% of it total energy needs from wind power by the year 2020. They are way ahead of schedule, and the number could climb as high as 25%.
So if we are going to berate the Chinese on climate issues, there is no time like the present, because the worm is about to turn.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
“Bring China to heel”… now there’s a viable concept.
The Chinese don’t really go for that kind of thinking.
Or hasn’t anyone noticed?
May 16th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
The first Great Depression became Great because of the trade war triggered by the Hawley-Smooth tariffs in the US. If events unfold according to your scenario, we can all say hello to Great Depression 2.0 (and no, the current economic crisis doesn’t yet qualify for that moniker).
May 16th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
kim:
link? I’d love to see this. Japan is pushing eco-everything here. You can’t walk around here without bumping into Warm Biz, Cool Biz, recycling, solar panels everywhere. They’ve got a long way to go, but they’re way ahead of the US. In addition, the Japanese will ban things from any country at the drop of a hat, which they’ve done to various food products from China after people died. It’s well in most people’s consciousness to avoid Chinese foods, it won’t take much to move that to other goods.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Jeremy, 46. Thanks for asking. Google ‘Japanese Energy Commission and follow the first link through Newsbusters to a translation of their report at the UKRegister.
Sure, Japan is big on energy efficiency and keeping the environment clean. So am I. There is no contradiction in having those beliefs and being skeptical about the CO2=AGW paradigm. In fact, some of we environmentalists are terribly distressed at the waste of good and useful social energy that chasing the CO2 chimera represents. This hoax about CO2 is actually counterproductive to good stewardship of the earth.
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May 17th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I think we should consider some mixture of the following with at least as much seriousness as visiting deliberate economic hardship upon a nation of a billion and a half, with a per-capita GDP of 6000 PPP ($3000 nominal). I take for granted obviously delightsome things like striving for fuel efficiency, increasing public transportation or trying to work out solar power/nuclear fusion/wind energy. Lets list therefore schemes that are less than ideal in themselves, noting that so is pushing against an economic miracle that has created what I regard as the greatest humanitarian triumph of the past fifty years.
- As much nuclear fission energy as possible
- Large (population displacing, ecology hurting) hydroelectric dam projects
- Reconciling to a reduced, but positive, change in temperature, say 1 C over the next hundred years
- Spewing sulfur into the atmosphere to lower temperatures or seeding parts of the ocean with iron to encourage algal growth and CO2 consumption.
Longer post here
May 18th, 2009 at 2:42 am
D, 48.
-Yes, more nuclear fission. Please develop pebble bed technology.
-Hydroelectric power plants have pretty much already been built where the topography allows them to be economically viable. There are rapidly diminishing returns for developing dams in less useful topography.
-We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know, but at least for two decades, and longer if the sun is going into hibernation. The small effect of warming that CO2 has and the large effect it has on crop fertilization will save many millions of the world’s poorest from freezing or starving to death.
-No geoengineering, please, until you have the omniscience of God to see all of the unintended consequences, which will make the disease pale before the horrors of the cure.
More discussion at your fine blog.
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