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Should
America shun Chinese goods to reduce global warming? Yes
CHARLESTON (W. VA.) GAZETTE
January 06, 2008
By Alan Tonelson
WASHINGTON — As made
painfully clear by last month’s international conference, the world’s
governments keep moving toward a global warming strategy that actually
boosts greenhouse gas emissions and weakens industry and all its
economic and strategic benefits in the United States and elsewhere in
the developed world.
The key is super-green
Europe’s growing support for a grand bargain that would strictly curb
greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries like the United States, while
placing only minimal restraints on the full-throttle economies of
massive new polluters like China and India.
The Bush administration has
resisted so far, but a new Democratic president could well seal this
deal. Since most rich-country manufacturing is much cleaner than most
Third World manufacturing, greenhouse gas emissions would keep surging —
fueled partly by American, European and even Japanese companies seeking
Third World pollution havens. As a result, economic hollowing out would
accelerate in the high-income world with most Americans suffering
disproportionately.
Preventing this looming
train wreck requires revolutionizing the politics of global warming —
fast. The United States should take the lead by slashing its imports
from China and thus shrinking to globally sustainable proportions
Beijing’s bloated, hyper-polluting industrial base.
An already huge,
metastasizing carbon footprint alone would justify special attention for
China. Its own figures show that the People’s Republic should pass the
United States as the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases this
year.
According to the
authoritative Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
however, China’s carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of output are five
times greater than America’s. Small wonder that the International Energy
Agency recently reported that China’s emissions growth nowadays exceeds
emissions growth from all other countries combined.
China’s booming use of
fossil fuels is the major reason. The country, for example, just passed
Japan to become the world’s second-largest oil consumer, after the
United States, and it has generated more than one-third of the growth in
world oil demand since 2002. China is a huge coal user as well.
If this record simply
reflected natural economic progress and still-lagging pollution control
technology, the case for targeting China would be weaker. Yet China’s
greenhouse gas machine is anything but a free-market creation.
As documented in a study
last year by the Peterson Institute, it stems mainly from the communist
regime’s use of trade protection, subsidies and other measures to boost
advanced — and energy-intensive — industry whatever the consequences.
Along the way, Beijing has
super-charged growth — and pollution — by heavily subsidizing energy use
in manufacturing and by failing almost completely to enforce its own
environmental regulations.
As a result of this
government intervention, China has become a much larger manufacturer. It
has gone from a producer mainly of relatively clean, labor-intensive
light manufactured goods to one mainly of dirtier capital-intensive
heavy manufactured goods.
And hundreds of billions of
dollars worth of manufacturing has fled Europe and the United States —
where clean manufacturing is advanced and environmental regulations
widely enforced — to an environmentally irresponsible country where even
the cleanest manufacturing is significantly dirtier.
Waiting for China’s
environmental consciousness to catch up with its industrialization is
the most widely discussed alternative to pressing for Chinese agreement
to serious and uniform global emissions curbs. But because of its
industrial shift, China’s emissions have increased, not decreased, as it
has prospered.
Trade limits are the best
lever available because so much of China’s growth and employment
creation — and thus the job security of its leaders — depends on
exporting. And the United States is by far the largest end-use market
for Chinese exports.
Environmentalists have long
warned that major action is needed right away to prevent further damage
from global warming. If they mean it, they’ll start using their
formidable talent to promote the downsizing of China’s trade-driven
greenhouse gas machine.
Tonelson is a research
fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Council in Washington and the
author of “The Race to the Bottom.”
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