Climate Change: “Thank you, China & India”

Deserving our thanks. India Prime Minister Singh (left) & China Prime Minister Wen

Whew. The much-ballyhooed Copenhagen Conference on climate change is now over. The verdict is in: The conference was a flop. Meaning: We Americans dodged a bullet. For that we must say, “Thank you China. Thank you India.” These two fast developing nations dug in their heels, refusing to be stampeded by the Europeans and the Obama Administration into signing onto an agreement imposing huge restraints on their economic growth and massive intrusions into their sovereignty. Sad to say, the U.S. delegation, headed by our President himself, apparently cared little about how much an agreement would reduce American living standards, would cost taxpayers and would allow other nations to meddle in our affairs. We were ready to sign and, indeed, actually had become breathless cheerleaders of almost any kind of agreement. But China and India, concerned mainly (and rightly) about their own well-beings, saved us from ourselves. So, again, “Thanks Beijing, thanks Delhi.”

I am not an expert on what is called “climate change” or “global warming,” but there are a few things that we non-experts do know. We know, for example, that because the putative issue of global warming and what to do about it can inspire proposals that drastically overhaul the way Americans live their lives and dream for their futures, we cannot simply leave the matter to those claiming expertise. Scientists strongly disagree among themselves about every aspect of the global warming issue. And, we have learned only too well in the past month, in a still-festering scandal popularly called “Climategate,” that those “experts” expressing most alarm about global warming blithely distort data, muzzle dissenters and use the power of lush government grants and funding to enforce orthodoxy.

What we American non-experts also know about climate change and should demand that our lawmakers consider before enacting sweeping regulations, are:

• Senseless unilateral action.
If human activity and the production of carbon dioxide really are warming the planet (and there is no scientific consensus that they are), then unilateral American action will not halt or even slow the warming. We may feel virtuous by denying ourselves and future generations the opportunities and comforts synonymous with the American way-of-life, but our sacrifices will be meaningless unless those developing nations that actually now produce (the technical term is “emit”) the most carbon dioxide also limit themselves. These nations, China and India being the most prominent and excessive “emitters,” absolutely will not slash their economic growth. They will not. Period. They have been waiting too many centuries for their chance to grow. Therefore, whatever unilateral actions we take will have no measureable impact on global warming. The only impact will be to make us poorer.

• Massive cost.
Every proposed global warming “solution” imposes massive costs which will reduce our growth and hence cut our ability to innovate, curb our hallmark social upward mobility which long has given us our great competitive advantage over every other nation and consign future generations (for the first time in our history) to be poorer than their predecessors. India and China greatly fear the staggering price tag of global warming “solutions.” So should we. And we should thank China and India for raising the issue of cost, a matter conveniently absent from most climate change discussions.

• Protecting our sovereignty.
China balked at any agreement or “protocol” establishing an international mechanism to monitor compliance. This, insists Beijing, would “infringe on China’s sovereignty.” As it would. We should be as protective of our sovereignty as China is of its.

• Paying poor nations.
We will be throwing away money if we pay poor nations to accept our climate change view. Yet this is what we were proposing (and still propose) in Copenhagen. There, the U.S. reversed a long-held position and went along with the Europeans’ plan to pay poor nations $10 billion a year for the next three years and $100 billion a year by 2020, ostensibly to help them deal with the consequences of global warming. (In exchange, these nations would support the American and European climate change proposals.) This money will be wasted. Leaving aside the matter that both the extent of global warming and its consequences are hugely controversial, a sad half-century history of foreign aid teaches us that almost all of what we give such nations will end up in the foreign bank accounts of their enormously corrupt rulers. None of this money will have any impact on global warming or on those nations’ abilities to deal with its presumed consequences. Anyway, this money will hardly satisfy the poor nations. When asked what he thought about the $100 billion-a-year handout, the chief negotiator for the poor nations bloc, a Sudanese diplomat, actually told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s still insufficient. We need more money.”

What now?
America survived Copenhagen. So, what do we do now about climate change? First, we buy time to allow serious, unbiased scientific investigation and unfettered debate about whether there is global warming and, if there is, whether it is caused by human activity rather than by the kinds of massive climate shifts the planet has experienced many times in its long history. Before we rush to impose measures that will transform and degrade our way of life for generations, let’s make sure there truly is a problem – and that, if there is a problem, we can do something to solve it.

Second, we hedge our bets by researching ways of dealing with the effects of global warming. After all, if we conclude that global warming is indeed serious but not caused by human activity, then there is nothing we can do to slow or halt it. All of the resources we will be spending on halting warming will have been wasted. We thus must be ready to confront and adapt to the warming – as humans have adapted to changing climate throughout the eons. If oceans will rise, let’s explore what we can do to protect coastal cities. If rain patterns will shift, let’s explore how food production can be sustained. Dealing with the effects of global warming will be vastly less costly and punishing to our society than attempts to reverse global warming – and it’s also something we can do ourselves, without the need for international agreements or intrusion on our sovereignty or payoffs to poor countries.

Perhaps the welcome collapse of the Copenhagen conference is giving us a new opportunity to be more sensible and calm in addressing the contentious climate change issue. Maybe the Copenhagen failure will put our discussions on a productive track. If that happens, Copenhagen will turn out to have been a great success. For that we will thank China and India.

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