[SustainableTompkins] Critique of Bill McKibben: A Deeper Shade of Green

[Tony Del Plato]

A critique of writing by McKibben on global warming in the NY Review of
Books follows & a response by McKibben follows:


To the Editors:

At one point in his otherwise compelling article on global warming politics
["The Coming Meltdown," NYR, January 12], Bill McKibben comes perilously
close to borrowing from the Bush administration a tired line that it has
long deployed to avoid committing the US to taking any action at all:
China's and India's greenhouse gas emissions are what we should really worry
about. Both Asian countries are indeed growing at least as rapidly as the
United States, Europe, or Japan did during their bouts of significant
industrialization. And since their populations are much bigger, their
emissions, particularly carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use, will soon be
quite impressive. But perhaps not all that soon. According to the Energy
Information Administration, China's emissions will just have caught up with
those of the US around 2025. India's emissions in that year will be about a
quarter of this amount. In per capita terms, despite slowing population
growth, China's emissions will be about one quarter of the US rate and
India's close to one twentieth.

Perhaps more significantly, and this is something no popular writer on the
subject ‹including McKibben‹seems to say loudly enough, what really matters
for climate change is the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide over the
course of a century or so. Therefore, while it is important to reduce the
rate of emissions growth from these large and rapidly industrializing
countries, their share of cumulative emissions may not start to matter for
another century or so. The US and Europe, on the other hand, carry a much
bigger burden of cumulative emissions (42 percent) than do India and China
combined (10 percent), and it is largely the impacts of those emissions that
we are witnessing today. In fact, the US and Europe will continue to have
the largest share of cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases for the
foreseeable future.

It is of course perfectly justifiable to remind large developing countries
that are starting to gain financial and political clout that they should
also behave responsibly toward the global commons. But the polemical edge of
such exhortations might need to be blunted on the basis of a well-known
eighteenth-century moral rule that one ought to act "only according to that
maxim by which one can at the same time will that it would become a
universal law." Kant's categorical imperative is no doubt a secular version
of the "what would Jesus drive" environmental campaign. But in both cases
the ethical reasoning for climate policy is simple: if we want to prevent
the climate from spinning out of control further along this century, a fair
allocation of burdens is essential, and those who have emitted the most, and
will therefore be responsible for the biggest impact, should take the
largest and most significant actions first.

Chella Rajan
Senior Fellow
Head, GlobalPolitics and Institutions
Tellus Institute
Boston, Massachusetts

Bill McKibben replies:

Chella Rajan gets it absolutely right, in my estimation. The standard
American response to the Kyoto treaty has always been: we won't do anything
unless China does too. But this is very silly. The reason the planet faces a
deep crisis is that we, and the rest of the industrialized world, have
filled the available atmospheric sink with carbon dioxide. To now say to the
Chinese and the Indians, "Sorry, we got there first; you find some other way
to get rich that doesn't rely on cheap fossil fuel" is both immoral and
politically unlikely. The only realistic solution, therefore, is to take
some of the wealth that we've amassed in the last century filling that
atmosphere, and transfer it to the developing world in the form of
alternative energy technology. There are mechanisms in the Kyoto pact that
would at least begin this transfer; they must be enlarged and strengthened.
Even as we take steps to rein in our own carbon emissions, we should be
taking the (cheaper) steps to keep the developing world from producing
carbon in the same amounts. And it is the greatest tragedy of the Bush
administration's nonpolicy on global warming that we have wasted five (going
on eight) crucial years when the trajectory of Chinese emissions might have
been nudged in a better direction‹when, to put it simplistically, we might
have helped them build windmills and hybrid cars rather than watch idly as
they built one coal-fired power plant after another.

At the moment, the US and China serve as each other's excuse for doing very
little. The Chinese can say‹understandably‹ that if the US does nothing they
should not have to either. The US can say‹disingenuously, for all the
reasons Rajan points out‹that China must make its move toward a lower carbon
future simultaneously. The result of this codependence will be only higher
temperatures for all to cope with.


-- 
"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something
rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
Seamus Heaney