Global Warming, China, and Fairness
May 29, 2017
by William P. Meyers

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Redistributing wealth won't solve this problem

Want to prevent global warming and its consequences? In that case you are probably, in the U.S. at least, centrist to left-of-center politically.

Which means that you tend to be pro-immigration (including illegal immigration), for higher wages for working people, and for higher welfare payments. You may or may not be anti-Chinese and against free trade.

You are also probably a big believer in fairness. After all, the reason you would tax the rich and demand that corporations pay their CEO less and janitors more, is fairness.

Unfortunately, the world is not a wish fulfillment factory, even on the level of government policy outcomes. Take a look at this table, which lists nations in order of how much globe-warming CO2 gas they emit. The most important thing to look at is the final column, emissions per capita. That compensates for the size of the populations of the various countries.

Probably the first thing you notices is the difference between the largest emitter, China, and the second-place nation, the United States of America. Per person, China emits less than half of what the U.S. emits. But China has about four times as many people as the U.S., and so the CO2 total is about twice the U.S.

A lot of international treaty negotiation fights around that fact, and the broader one that asking a nation like Pakistan (0.9 per person) to reduce its emissions is basically saying:

Poor people, you fight global warming by staying poor, and we'll fight global warming by staying rich.

Note that Canada, often the darling of liberals, and Saudi Arabia, typically hated by liberals, produce about the same CO2 per person. There is a direct correlation between rich countries and high CO2 emissions. For all their talk, liberals typically emit as much CO2 as their conservative counterparts, when income levels are the same.

Which means, with some certainty, that if we reduce the per-person CO2 emissions in a country like the U.S., we will become relatively poorer.

And how do you divide up a negative piece of pie? Generally, in the U.S., the poorer you are, the bigger helping of negative pie gets served to you.

It is easy enough for leftists to scream "higher pay and less global warming," but the two tend to opposite directions. U.S. working class (and welfare) pay is high according to global standards (though not the highest). Higher pay means more consumption, and more consumption means more CO2 emissions. You can talk about your solar panels and your wind turbines, your passive solar and your electric cars, but that is just spitting in the wind compared to the results of an overall increase in consumption per person.

Then there is population. Take a look at per capita emissions from some of the nations where illegal immigration comes from: India 1.9; Mexico 3.7; Columbia 1.7, Philippines 1.1. Say the average 3rd world immigrant comes from a 2.0 country. Simply by living in the U.S., at 16.1, they end up with 8 times the emissions.

Then there is population increase. Every child born in the U.S. comes in at 16.1.

Environmentalists should be lobbying for a one child policy so that the U.S. population is reduced to its long-term sustainable level, over the next 3 to 4 generations. That would be on top of anything that can be achieved by convincing people to limit their consumption.

Which is why I am an unpopular leftist. You get popular by telling people what they want to hear, like that current-day unskilled workers should live like the middle class of the U.S. in the 1950s, that every illegal immigrant has a right to be here, and that all we need to do is increase taxes on the right and buy more solar panels from China and wind turbines from Germany.

I'm all for taxing the rich. I'm all for turning CEOs upside down and shaking them until their money falls to their worst-paid workers. I'm fine with solar panels, though we would not need so many if we would just turn off our air conditioners and learn to sweat again. But I am not fine with unlimited immigration and I don't think it is a human right to have as many children as you like. Not in this world, not in this era.

A fair international global warming treaty would put each country on a trajectory towards equal CO2 emissions per person. At a low level that stops global warming. Don't expect that while greed remains the main rule of human culture, from the working class to the middle class to the ruling class.