The Flaw in the Global Warming/Climate Justice Solutions

[Txsteader]

I knew this was coming when China and India refused to sign the Paris accord.

theweek.com/articles/584216/why-climate-justice-india-west-each-others-throats

Emphasis mine

All issues that require collective action, especially on a global scale, are difficult to resolve because they suffer from the free-rider problem, i.e. some parties seek to benefit from the "common good" without springing for it. But as Oren Cass, a Manhattan Institute analyst, notes, fighting climate change is a particularly vexing problem because the individual cost to each country, especially Third World ones, will be immediate and huge — and the benefits distant and uncertain. The notion that emission cuts can pay for themselves through increased energy efficiency is at best fanciful and, at worst, a lie.

There are no low-carbon energy technologies available today that can sustain the economic growth rates these countries need to lift their people out of abject poverty, let alone offer Western living standards at anything resembling an affordable cost. Over 300 million Indians still live below the poverty line, earning less than $1 per day. India's per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than the United States'. India has to keep boosting its energy use — and therefore carbon emissions — for at least another two decades to eliminate dire poverty, which is why its reduction plan only commits to slashing "emission intensity" — its emission rate as a percentage of its GPD — not emissions themselves.

Even this much, India claims, will require up to a $2.5 trillion investment over the next 15 years in renewable energy sources and adaptation technologies. Even if that figure is exaggerated, clearly this would be a challenge for a country that has yet to offer basic sanitation, transportation, and clean-water infrastructure to all its citizens.

Third World countries insist that justice demands that every country get a quota based on its population. By that arithmetic, America's total quota would add up to 128 Gt (and the entire developed world's 406 Gt). But America used up over twice that amount between 1850-2011. As these countries see it, America (as the rest of the Western world) is in their ecological debt. It needs to put itself on a drastic energy diet — and effectively undo the industrial revolution that has generated untold wealth for it. Especially since India has used only 7 percent of its share. "For the sake of the world's future, American lifestyle can no longer remain non-negotiable," froths India's leading environmentalist, Sunita Narain.

Global warming warriors warn that inaction will produce political instability and civil war in Africa and elsewhere. But it is also conceivable that a really determined West could use the aegis of some UN-like global agency to create a standing military strike force to bomb or drone countries into compliance. Humanity’s very existence would be at stake, after all. (President Al Gore, anyone?)

The tragedy of current efforts to combat global warming is that in order to avert a tragedy they'll cause one.

Indeed. The world is being run by madmen.

[Ozarks Tom]

Tell me again how much we "owe" third world countries. Our nation, and countries who've followed our form of government, have given the world the progress and models that have lifted billions out of abject poverty. It's only the corruption and ignorance endemic in those countries that hold them back.

I remember in Viet Nam seeing huge stacks of grain/rice/wheat sacks marked "USAid", in the marketplaces for sale.

I don't know why, when they had to change the name of the "crisis" from global warming to climate change everyone didn't see the scam for what it is.

[Wanderer0101]

The whole Global Warming agenda is just another face of leftism. The fundamental aim is to take from the productive and give to the unproductive so that almost everyone lives in the same dismal sea of mediocrity while a very few of the elite call all the shots. Only the truly gullible buy all this garbage.