September 25, 2014
The NYT had a bizarre article on India’s projected path of greenhouse gas emissions, noting that its emissions are likely to continue to rise at least through 2030. The piece notes that India is likely to pass both the United States and China as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases. The piece presents India’s situation as providing a real moral dilemma since the country still has so many people living in poverty and it needs to increase energy production to sustain its growth and lift people out of poverty.
The moral dilemma is actually much simpler than the piece implies. The comments reported as assertions by Indian political figures happen to be true. Global warming would not be a problem if the United States and other rich countries had not been spewing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for many decades. For this reason, asking India to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions when they are still less than one quarter as high on a per capita basis as U.S. emissions (a fact that was not mentioned in the piece) might not seem terribly fair.
The obvious way around this problem is to have the United States and other rich countries pay poor countries like India to reduce their emissions. This is actually a very simple thing to do. In fact, given the weakness of demand in the U.S. and Europe, paying these countries to reduce emissions would actually increase employment and growth in the wealthy countries.
It might be hard for politicians to suggest something like making payments to poor countries to ensure that our children live on a decent planet, just like many politicians find it difficult to say they believe in evolution, but it really shouldn’t be difficult for a newspaper to discuss these issues in a serious manner.
Comments