China and India — and "common and differentiated responsibilities"

 I have so far received a few responses to my original email, and a few issues have come up… so that will be a good jumping-off point for me to further explore some of the issues I have been reading about…

One of the things I read a lot these day in the press, or in comments in online forums, or wherever, is that even if the US gets its emissions under control (a pretty unlikely scenario), we are at the mercy of developing nations like China and India. China, of course, famously passed the US in total emissions not long ago, and that seems to give many people an incentive to worry about developing nations rather than our own profligate consumption.

I am extremely wary of this urge to make China and India the bugaboos in this (led by our climate negotiators, who would like nothing better than a chance to deflect blame from ourselves). The principal of "common and differentiated responsibilities" in the Kyoto Protocol was devised for a reason -- if you think of the total amount of carbon we as a global species can release "safely" as our carbon budget, then we in the West, and especially we in the US, have already used far more than our share. So now we are trying to tell the rest of the world "we got ours, we got fat and comfortable off the stores of ancient sunlight, now it's time for ALL of us to cut back, too bad for you." I compare that to the "water rationing" our water company imposes in drought years, when all of us are required to cut back by 15% — whether we are only using what we need to survive, or are wasting water by watering huge lawns on sprawling estates every day… The latest figures show the US using 17.2 tons of CO2 per capita (slightly down from the 19 - 20 tons we used for the last few decades, but only because we are offshoring our emissions as companies move operations to low-wage countries). China is now up to 5.3 tons per capita, less than a third of our rate; and India's emissions are 1/12th of ours, at 1.4. So it's a little hard for us to point fingers across the globe… Yes, it is frightening to think of how emissions are growing in the East, but so much of that is driven by our own consumption — in a sane world, emissions would be counted at the consumption end, not the production end, and it would be entirely clear who is driving this destruction.

I'll end this one as well with a quote, this one from British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (quoted on Environmental Research), who figures that about 40-60% of the world's emissions come from 1-5% of the world's population, including "climate scientists, every journalist, pontificator and sceptic… [and] everyone who gets on a plane once a year… So we're the major emitters – we know who they are. Are we prepared to make changes to our lives now or have them forced upon us?"