Another way to look at it: China and India committed to permanent greehouse gas advantage for the US (and Marco Rubio is lying)

News recently announced that China plans to enact a carbon tax, along with its longstanding commitment to never match US per-capita emission rates, and India's greater commitment to never match OECD rates, all suggest a need to look at emissions a different way.

What matters is total emissions over the modern time period from the recent past until several generations (at least) into the future.  There has to be a limit, that limit has to be divided among nations, and that division has to take population into account at some level.  The US can't be expected to produce the same total emissions as Mexico, and China can't be expected to produce the same as the US.

So if we set a per-capita limit, with China and India agreeing that for all of the 20th Century and for much of the 21st Century that the US can produce more per-capita, then the total per-capita emissions over the two centuries (or even just the 21st Century) will be far greater for the US.  China and India are saying they're willing to accept that outcome.

China and India could easily have taken a different stance, and said that because the US produces more emissions per-capita in the first 50 years of the 21st Century (let alone the previous century), then they should be allowed to produce more per-capita in the second half.  Instead they are planning to do more than we are doing.

For Republicans like Marco Rubio to say the rest of the world is doing nothing and therefore we shouldn't either, when China and India have actually committed to do more than the US by having total lower emissions, is outrageous.  And no matter how you slice it, Rubio is lying about India repeatedly - even with three times the US population it is not "polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are" - their total emissions are one-third of ours.  Rubio is lying, and the rest of them are deceptive.

Good climate news, bad climate news

On the good news front, an excellent post from David Roberts on the amount of emissions the US has cut in recent years.  Go read.  Joe Romm has argued that we may have reached peak emissions in the US in 2007, this provides additional support.  New to me was that wind power is following the same downward price trend as solar, and may reach price parity with gas in this decade.

So enough with the good news.  Bad news is with global emissions generally, and China particularly:

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) -- the main cause of global warming -- increased by 3% last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tonnes in 2011. In China, the world's most populous country, average emissions of CO2 increased by 9% to 7.2 tonnes per capita. China is now within the range of 6 to 19 tonnes per capita emissions of the major industrialised countries. In the European Union, CO2 emissions dropped by 3% to 7.5 tonnes per capita. The United States remains one of the largest emitters of CO2, with 17.3 tones per capita, despite a decline due to the recession in 2008-2009, high oil prices and an increased share of natural gas.

I still wouldn't assign China the same level of blame as Europe - it's the total emissions per capita that matter, not the annual emissions.  China has also promised not to hit the US level of per capita emissions.  While China and India don't deserve the same level of blame as the developed democracies, they are on a very dangerous course for the entire world.

Google and China

Not the usual stuff I write about, but I've been following it.  Hard to avoid when their headquarters are two miles from me.

One possible outcome of Google's rebuff to Chinese censorship is that Google would actively join efforts to defeat the Great Firewall.  It's already possible for determined Chinese citizens to beat the Firewall, but a massive and innovative corporation joining those efforts could make it a lot easier.  I suspect that this is one piece of leverage Google retains while China figures out how hard to push against the company.  OTOH, no one else is talking about it, so maybe it's not that important or likely.

James Fallows posted an interesting reader email.  The reader argues that China can't let Google dominate the search market, because China needs the information about domestic society that it can only get from closely monitoring searches.  What's interesting is that it isn't solely a "need" in the typical evil dictatorship way (although it's that too), but a need to understand its own people that it can't get because of the lack of free speech and free elections.

The mostly-negative business community commentary about Google says more about the commenters than Google.  I think they're showing a combination of ressentiment and wanna-be schadenfreude against a successful corporation that they'd like to see taken off its high horse.  Also mixed in is apprehension over anyone taking corporate social responsibility beyond the minimum common denonimator.

I have no idea how it'll play out.  From the sidelines it would be far more interesting to me to see Google really take on Chinese censorship, but I'm not the one who's already walked away from a third of the share of the Chinese search market and still wants to rescue the rest of its business.  Anyone who says Google is just leaving to say face, doesn't have much business sense in my opinion.  I think Google has shown a willingness to take a hit in order to keep some reality in its business motto.

The China-Copenhagen Syndrome

The Guardian reports that China was responsible for making Copenhagen much less comprehensive than it could have been, while avoiding any public responsibility for it. This sounds plausible to me - they take global warming seriously there, with energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, renewable power, and nuclear power all getting significant investment, while at the same time pumping out as many coal plants as possible. Coal power plants are meant to run for 30 years or more. China wants to keep its options open.

Maybe this has something to do with the resistance to China's call for reparations - why write a climate-related check to a country that is screwing up attempts to address climate. I'm sympathetic to this resistance regarding China, whose per-capita emissions may be one third of the US but are still far too high. Other countries, however, have done far less to increase CO2 concentrations, and to tell them that we get the benefit of polluting while they have to hold back the same as we do isn't going to cut it.

Matt Yglesias misses the point by apparently believing climate debt presents a binary choice of blank checks for dictators, or doing nothing to rectify past emissions (his choice). I think we can be a little more subtle than that.

And while I'm being cranky, the New York Times misses the point on focusing on safety concerns for China's nuclear expansion by neglecting the alternative - even more coal plants. Coal pollution kills thousands each year here in the US - I can't imagine the numbers in China. A nuclear meltdown every couple decades would kill far fewer people. I'm not a huge fan of nukes due to costs, nuclear weapons proliferation, exposure to terrorism and (in the US) restriction on legal liability, but safety isn't an issue.