Monday, July 14, 2008

It’s A Gas, Baby

While the western world runs around in a panic about how global warming is going to kill us all by sometime next Tuesday if we don’t all revert back to some kind of Luddite, Amish lifestyle where we commune with Mother Gaia and atone for the evil sin of wanting to live better lives, China and India are telling the world to fuck off.

A year ago China released its own global warming strategy—its own Garnaut report—which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.

Said Ma Kai, head of China’s powerful State Council: “China does not commit to any quantified emissions-reduction commitments . . . our efforts to fight climate change must not come at the expense of economic growth.”

In fact, we had to get used to more gas from China, not less: “It is quite inevitable that during this (industrialisation) stage, China’s energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be quite high.”

Last month, India likewise issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change, and also rejected Rudd-style cuts.

The plan’s authors, the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.

“It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people.”

The plan’s only real promise was in fact a threat: “India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries.”

See, it’s real easy for people in the west, especially those earth-worshipers who clearly know how everyone should live their lives and aren’t afraid to use the force of law to ensure your compliance, to expect the third world to stay mired in poverty.  After all, they’re poor brown people.  They like living in filth.  And how dare their governments care more about improving the economies of their countries and the lives of ther citizens than kowtow to the “sky is falling” mentality of the greenhouse doomsayers.

If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this wonderful little piece of global warming agitprop put together by the Australian government.  It—I shit you not—tells you how long you are entitled to live according to “your share” of the earth’s resources.  In other words, the resources of the earth are a pie, and everyone gets a slice the same size.  When your slice is gone you’re supposed to die, lest you commit the unpardonable sin of wanting to live your life at a standard higher than that of India and China.

Developing nations have it right.  We have it wrong.  And entering into any agreement to curb greenhouse emissions while India and China are not doing so is an exercise in futility, since it will incentivize even more foreign companies to move their business to those countries in order to avoid the draconian limits on emissions placed in their more “enlightened Fatherlands.”