Power Hungry (25 page)

That's why the world's most authoritative forecasters expect the developing world to surpass the United States and the European Union in carbon dioxide emissions. When you consider the huge numbers of people
who live in the developing world, it's apparent that they
should
surpass us. In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that the carbon dioxide emissions of the developed countries of the world—that is, the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—were surpassed by those of the non-OECD countries in 2006. And by 2030, the agency expects that carbon dioxide emissions from the non-OECD countries will be nearly double those of the OECD countries.
⁹

FIGURE 25
Total Carbon Dioxide Emissions, OECD Countries Versus Non-OECD Countries, 1990 to 2030

Source
: International Energy Agency,
World Energy Outlook 2008
, Table 16.2, “Energy-Related CO
₂
Emissions by Region in the Reference Scenario.”

Those numbers should not be surprising. A bit of arithmetic can corroborate the estimates by simply looking at the world's six most populous countries. They are, in descending order of population, China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

The energy disparity among the residents of the Big Six is stark. The United States, with about 300 million residents, consumes almost as much energy as the other five most populous countries, the Big Five, combined. The total population of the Big Five—Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan—is about 3 billion, and between 2000 and 2006, that population increased its energy use by more than 50 percent. Despite that huge increase, the average resident of the Big Five uses about one-tenth as much energy as the average American.
¹⁰
Of course, many Americans believe the United States uses too much energy. And various environmental groups suggest that the United States should simply “use less.”

But the citizens of the United States could not stop the ongoing rise in carbon dioxide emissions even if they all reached a consensus, because so many people are still living in energy poverty. Furthermore, the industrialized countries in general, and the United States in particular, have no moral standing to tell the developing countries that they should slow the growth of their own energy consumption.

Bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and thus, into higher standards of living—means providing them with access to cheap, plentiful energy. And like it or not, that largely means hydrocarbons. Of course, increasing the use of hydrocarbons will mean further increases in carbon dioxide emissions. The leaders of the developing world understand this, and they have very clearly stated that they are not going to quit using hydrocarbons.

In June 2009, just a few days after the House of Representatives passed its cap-and-trade bill, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said that India “will not accept any emission-reduction target—period. This is a non-negotiable stand.” The Indian leader was very clear, saying that “there is no way India is going to accept any emission reduction target, period, between now and the Copenhagen meeting [held from December 7–18, 2009] and thereafter.”
¹¹
Chinese officials have made similar statements.

One of the best arguments against any effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions from the use of hydrocarbons comes from Freeman Dyson, a renowned professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In August 2007, Dyson wrote an essay for
Edge.org
that made me reconsider my own thinking on energy use and climate issues. Dyson quickly conveyed his skepticism about the models being used by climate scientists:

But the essence of Dyson's essay isn't about the computer models. Instead, it's about equity and human development. And that's where Dyson points to the need for clean, cheap, abundant energy. “The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms,” he wrote. “The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity.”
¹³

To that, I say amen.

The hard truth is that the people of the world are going to have to adapt to a changing planet—regardless of the causes of those climatic changes. If the climate gets colder, hotter, wetter, or drier, we're simply going to have to figure out how to cope, because the billions of people now living in poverty desperately want to improve their standards of living. And one of the cheapest, fastest ways for them to do that is by burning hydrocarbons. What will adaptation to the changing climate mean? Well, for one thing, it may mean relocating large swaths of the population away from areas most affected by the symptoms of global warming. For example, those living in coastal cities may have to
move further inland, while those in desert cities may have to go to wetter regions.

In short, I don't side with the “climate alarmists” like Al Gore, who famously—and nonsensically—declared in his movie
An Inconvenient Truth
that “you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero.”
¹⁴
Nor do I side with the “climate skeptics” who maintain that nothing is happening. Instead, I consider myself a realist, a pragmatist who has done the math on carbon dioxide emissions and understands that no matter what course of action the United States takes—short of completely shutting down its economy and consigning the vast majority of its citizens to the drudgery of scratching out an existence with something approximating 40 acres and a mule—it cannot, and will not, make a significant difference to concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

And that's the key issue. Over the past few decades, nearly the entire discussion about global warming and climate change has focused on the desire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But for all the talk about reducing carbon emissions, the reality is starkly obvious: Those efforts have failed miserably.

The Kyoto Protocol was supposed to address global climate change. Adopted in 1997, the agreement took force in 2005. By 2009, some 188 countries had signed the agreement.
¹⁵
The United States was not among them. In the late 1990s, the U.S. Senate voted 94 to 2 against ratifying the agreement.
¹⁶
How well has Kyoto worked? By 2012, it is expected that just 6 of the signatories will have achieved their goal; emissions in the other 182 will likely still be well above target levels. Among the countries that have failed to achieve the targets, for example, is Japan. By late 2007, Japan's carbon dioxide emissions were 14 percent above the Kyoto target.
¹⁷
By early 2009, with the country still far above the target level, the Japanese had begun buying carbon offsets.
¹⁸
The inability of Japan—which has high population density, a homogeneous society, and an extremely energy-efficient economy—to achieve the carbon dioxide reductions outlined in Kyoto may be the single best indicator of the impracticality of the proposed carbon-reduction schemes. And Japan's failure to achieve its carbon reduction targets provides a stark warning about the ability of the United States to achieve an 80 percent reduction by 2050.

The problem, once again, can be shown by doing basic math. Here are the numbers: In 2006, the United States emitted about 5.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
¹⁹
That means that the average American is responsible for the production of about 20 tons of carbon dioxide annually. (The U.S. population is about 307 million.)
²⁰
An 80 percent reduction in U.S. emissions would mean that the United States would only be allowed to emit about 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050. That level of emissions would take the United States back to the levels achieved in 1910, when the country's factories and households emitted about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
²¹
But in 1910, the United States only had about 92 million people, and the per-capita income (in 2009 dollars) was about $6,000. Today, the population is more than three times greater than it was a century ago, and thankfully, per-capita incomes have jumped to more than $39,000.
²²
By 2050, the United States will likely have about 439 million people.
²³
At that population level—and remember, total emissions are to be no more than 1.2 billion tons per year—per-capita carbon dioxide emissions would have to be about 2.7 tons per year, or about one-seventh of current per-capita emission levels of about 20 tons per year.

Which countries are close to achieving Obama's implied per-capita target of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year? In 2006, countries that had emissions in that range included Cuba (2.36 tons), North Korea (3.18), and Syria (2.65). In 2006, global average per-capita carbon dioxide emissions amounted to 4.28 tons per year—or about 50 percent higher than what the United States is aiming to achieve by 2050.
²⁴

Under the target identified by Obama and congressional Democrats, by 2050, U.S. per-capita emissions would have to be far lower than those of current-day China, where each citizen now emits the world average of about 4.27 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
²⁵
As Steven Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out in a 2008 op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal
, the “enthusiasm for an 80% reduction target is often justified on grounds that national policy should set an ambitious goal.”
²⁶
But as Hayward noted, there's a difference between an ambitious goal and an absurd one. The chances of the United States actually achieving an 80 percent cut in carbon dioxide output by 2050 ranges somewhere between slim and none. And, as my father used to say, “Slim left town.”

Source
: International Energy Agency, “Key World Energy Statistics 2008,”
http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2008/key_stats_2008.pdf
, 49–57.

But just for the sake of discussion, let's run the numbers one more time, and let's do it in a way that is favorable to the 80 percent reduction target. Let's assume that the U.S. population doesn't grow at all over the next four decades, so that by 2050, there are still about 307 million Americans. Again, the math is straightforward: With 1.2 billion tons of total annual carbon dioxide emissions, divided among 307 million people, the United States would have per-capita emissions of about 4 tons. That's fine. But it's still less than the world average per-capita carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. Indeed, it's nearly 10 percent below the level in Jamaica, a country where per-capita GDP in 2006 was about $7,500.
²⁷

The reality is that, for all the talk about drastic cuts in carbon dioxide, the United States cannot—and it will not—make any radical reductions in its carbon output. And the reasons it won't are obvious: There are no cheap—and that is the most essential qualifier—viable technologies that will allow it to do so; Americans are not willing to change their lifestyles to make it happen; and any government-mandated restrictions on hydrocarbon use that would be severe enough to achieve the 80 percent reduction target would almost certainly ruin the economy.