Sunday, August 24, 2008

The Great Thing About Global Warming

What’s the difference between a drowned American, a drowned Chinese person and a drowned Indian? Absolutely nothing.

This is how I feel about America’s refusal to engage on binding carbon-emission-reduction treaties like Kyoto. As America frets about losing her place as the economic prom queen, she’s ignoring the fact that the vast majority of her citizens, if held under water for an extended period of time, will die. New York is just waiting to fall off its rock. Los Angeles has been itching to go aquatic since God invented earthquakes. (Not that anybody will miss it much. Plus, everyone will have already left for want of drinking water). But this is why global warming is so brilliant. It doesn’t matter where the pollution is coming from. We’re all screwed. Everybody loses.


Always before pollution has been a localized problem. Indeed, the technical definition of pollution is an excessive concentration of any substance within a given volume. Normally, that “volume” is something fairly specific like the water downstream from a paper mill or the air under an overpass. People with choice move upstream or into the suburbs, and since it is the people with choice that make money from the pollution generators and write the laws that govern them, change happens slowly. Only when the people with choice can not reasonably escape is serious action taken.


The EPA’s immensely successful Acid Rain Program is an excellent example of this. East coast cities in the US were suffering because of NOx and S
Ox that were blowing their way from Midwestern and Appalachian cars and coal fired power plants. A regulatory scheme was concocted that sets a cap for acid-rain-causing emissions and requires industry to acquire pollution credits, which they can then trade. SO2 levels will have dropped almost by half since 1980 and the program was significantly less expensive to operate than originally projected. Excellent indeed, but I doubt the EPA would jump so fast if the Midwest started catching the pollution of wealthy East Coasters.

What I glean from all this is that cap-and-trade trade treaties (like Kyoto) can be used to great effect if the rich parties involved think they have something to gain from signing on.
Apparently, America still thinks that she will fare fine in the face of climate change, or at least fare better than other countries with fewer resources. But keeping up with the Joneses becomes a morbid game when the contest is over who will have fewer hundreds-of-thousands of deaths and climate refugees.

With the biggest historical carbon footprint by far, the most luxury emissions and the richest population in the world, America has the most room for improvement and the most power to change. In order to avoid the worst disasters associated with a rapidly warming planet, we need to make big changes and big sacrifices immediately. So I implore you America: keep stalling if you want. Keep bemoaning the inaction of India and China, whose per capita emissions are small fractions of ours. Carry on as you were; you will only be hurting everybody.