Looks like China has surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions. Obviously, for those of us who believe that carbon emissions translate into climate change, getting China into the fold is extremely important. Of course, that doesn’t reduce the need for us in the U.S. and other nations to also get things going.
China Now Leads in Total Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Says Report
Here’s one area where the United States is happy to come in second place: in carbon dioxide emissions. According to a new analysis by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China surpassed the United States in total carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. While China’s emissions were about 2% below the U.S. emissions in 2005, the U.S. emissions decreased slightly in 2006, while China’s emissions increased by 8.7%, making them 8% greater than the U.S. emissions. According to the report, China produces about 44% of the world’s cement, and the high energy use of this industry is a key factor in the country’s high carbon dioxide emissions. See the agency’s press release.
The Dutch agency later tried to place these figures in perspective, noting that on a per capita basis, the United States still produces roughly four times as much carbon dioxide as China, at about 20 tons per person. The agency also noted that a substantial part of China’s emissions are due to its production of goods for export to industrialized countries. Current greenhouse gas agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, do not address which country is ultimately responsible for the emissions generated in one country while manufacturing a product for use in another country. See the agency’s follow-up press release.
Fatmouse, you left out the part as to why this is all Bush’s fault.
I can’t seem to figure that part out by myself, but I am pretty sure it starts with the fact that Bush didn’t approve the Kyoto treaty back when Clinton was still president.
Sorry Art. You’ll have to go to someone else for the “Blame Bush” stuff. I’m sure you can find those folks to argue with, or even make up their arguments for them so you can cut them down.
NPR did an interesting story this morning about defective tires produced in China and sold under several names. Looks like the trade issue is starting to take on new and potentially ugly forms.
And I meant to comment on one of the last items of the article I posted. They said there is still discussion about who to credit emissions to, the producer, or the country of destination for the product. Sounds like an interesting idea. We could charge the oil producing nations for the emissions when we burn their fuels here. Takes the burden off us. Maybe we can blame Bush for not negotiating that deal.
I did however like the last part of the article that basically said “We are still trying to figure out how to blame the US for China’s carbon emissions”
“Looks like the trade issue is starting to take on new and potentially ugly forms.”
i have a view i’ve concocted that i’m sure sounds pretty bad to some ears, that china has come so late to capitalism, and so much of it is for export, that there has been no time to develop any sense of business ethics or sense of community between producer and consumer.
as a result, spiking food in order to achieve a higher test result is not only done, the interviews i’ve read say that the chinese who do it don’t see what the hubbub is about. yes, i cheated in developing a food product i can sell for more money? your point is?
in every toy recall in the U.S. this year – some dozens i think – has been of a toy manufactured in china. lead paint, for example. and on it goes.
really, it’s very much like mideast oil. we’ve become so addicted to chinese imports that i don’t know whether it’s within our power to stop. i question whether we even have the political will to do anything about it at all.
“We could charge the oil producing nations for the emissions when we burn their fuels here. Takes the burden off us. Maybe we can blame Bush for not negotiating that deal.”
I knew you wouldn’t let me down.
We need to get this thread over to it is all America’s fault, preferably because of Bush. I am pretty sure it won’t take long.
i have a view i’ve concocted that i’m sure sounds pretty bad to some ears, that china has come so late to capitalism, and so much of it is for export
I would suggest that this “Gap” in ethics is not one of community but of ignorance. The level of education surrounding such things as the effects of lead paint, spiked food green house gases in China is so low as to not spark any level of concern amoungst the population in general. The quality of life of many in China is simply not effected greatly by a few deaths via lead poisoning. In short, safety issues that concern us, simply don’t concern them.
in every toy recall in the U.S. this year – some dozens i think – has been of a toy manufactured in china
Not to point out the obvious, but it’s hard to have a recall on an American made toy…when we don’t make any anymore.
eally, it’s very much like mideast oil. we’ve become so addicted to chinese imports that i don’t know whether it’s within our power to stop. i question whether we even have the political will to do anything about it at all.
Actually I find the addiction to Chinese products and or “cheap labor products” far more troublesome than foreign oil. It’s relatively easy to find a new energy source compared to being able to find a cheap labor source within the US. By comparison implementing various new energies could be done without a significant blow to our lifestyle. I’m afraid that making everything in the US or equally expensive labor pools and highly regulated would impact us far more.
We need to get this thread over to it is all America’s fault, preferably because of Bush.\\
We are the worlds leader in a lot of categories, but pumping 20 tons of gas per person into the air, is not one we should be proud of. It’s been going on for some time now, and we all know it, so in some respect we are to blame for setting such a bad example to the world. It’s not Bush’s fault, but he has kept the train rollin…Hard to fault China or any other 3rd world nation, when your own house is so dirty. I spent some time in CHina back in the 80’s, and they absolutly don’t have a problem with any of this new stuff we are buying from them. WHen I was there, about 90% of them smoked, and they absolutly believed that it did not cause cancer. They really live in the moment there, and have no regard for the future…Their leaders are different, in that they look way into the future, but they must have a plan that I cannot fathom right now…They are where we were in the 50’s and 60’s as far as enviormental issues are concerned. We seem to be turning the corner in awareness, but it has taken 50 years. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take China that long, or we are in for a world of hurt. Imagine if 1 1/2 billion people start putting our 20 tons of C02 into the air, to go along with our contribution. Then throw in India with their billion or so, and we will be living on Mars in a few hundred years…
china has come so late to capitalism, and so much of it is for export, that there has been no time to develop any sense of business ethics or sense of community between producer and consumer.
The problem isn’t that they’re late to capitalism, it’s that they don’t have a sense of business ethics to bring with them. They’re practicing a more pure form of capitalism, if you will.
** i question whether we even have the political will to do anything about it at all.**
You’re being silly. Of course there’s political will to do something about it. There is all kinds of political will to do something about it. Both sides of the aisle, in fact, have plenty of political will to do something about it.
They want to accelerate the process. Have you not been paying attention?
They are in such a hurry to modernize that they aren’t even aware of the consequences. 70% of China’s lakes and rivers are now polluted so bad the fish and other wildlife are dying off. Farmland is disappearing at such a rapid rate that in a few decades China will not have the ability to feed itself.
The “future” will come sooner than they realize. By that time it may be too late.
i’m an ignorant slut, remember? just start every post to me with, “you’re an ignorant slut,” as a placeholder for the personal dig.
“There is all kinds of political will to do something about it. Both sides of the aisle”
there’s a difference between political narrative and political will. there are talking points, and then there is action. look at immigration, and social security, and dependence on oil. lots of windbagging, not much action. i have no doubt there will be a lot of hand wringing about this, but do you really expect to see legislation limiting chinese imports, or charging a tariff generating money to specifically fund an increase in manpower to inspect and enforce? or in forcing the chinese to allow U.S. inspectors to visit chinese factories?
i’m an ignorant slut, remember? just start every post to me with, “you’re an ignorant slut,” as a placeholder for the personal dig.
Oh, come now. You really found that to be insulting? I’m saving the ignorant slut thing for times when I really am making a personal dig. (Though if Brick doesn’t stop stealing my line, I’m gonna need something new.)
do you really expect to see legislation limiting chinese imports, or charging a tariff generating money to specifically fund an increase in manpower to inspect and enforce?
I think you misunderstood my post. No, I don’t expect to see any legislation limiting Chinese imports or anything like that. And I don’t think that most of the political narrative is out of kilter with the political will, either. I fully expect to hear much more of the narrative that China is an important and valued trading partner, and that our relationship with them is and can only be mutually beneficial, and that massive trade deficits with China are actually a desirable thing, and we live in a global economy, and so on and so on. And I expect to continue to hear that from both sides of the political establishment. And I fully expect that their political will, as expressed in real policy, will continue to match that rhetoric.
Once in awhile one of them will throw us a bone about human rights in China, or copyright protection, and stuff like that, and I grant that on those limited issues, the political will does not really match the narrative point.
“I fully expect to hear much more of the narrative that China is an important and valued trading partner”
i don’t know, man, i think you may be reading the tea leaves wrong. it’s one thing when your jeans are made over there. when people wake up to the fact that stuff like folic acid, vitamic C, their kids toys, their so-called health food, is all made in china, when they pretty much can’t eat a mean, at any time, without having chinese ingredients made by these factories that just don’t care one bit what happens to the person on the other end of the globe that consumes the product. the toothpaste with cyanide or rat poison or whatever it was they found in it.
we already had the shtick about chinese markets opening up to us, and we need to get those relationships established before the euros do. that was the narrative over the past 10 or 15 years. i think that line is going to be increasingly replaced by the scarier stories we’re seeing over and over in the news now. i suspect the upcoming legislation talked about is going to be anti-chinese and protectionist. but i don’t expect anything to actually happen.
we already had the shtick about chinese markets opening up to us, and we need to get those relationships established before the euros do. that was the narrative over the past 10 or 15 years.
The “we better access that market before Europe does” routine was a sub-shtick in the larger “globalization is Good” shtick, which is still very much with us, and which I don’t think shows any signs of going away.
i think that line is going to be increasingly replaced by the scarier stories we’re seeing over and over in the news now. i suspect the upcoming legislation talked about is going to be anti-chinese and protectionist.
I doubt it. We might get the scary news stories, and we might even get scared. The political narrative is going to remain substantially the same: The way to solve whatever problems exist is more capitalism, stronger economic ties, etc etc. And the legislation will continue in that vein.
When the ruling elite gets an idea in it’s collective head, it doesn’t really give a damn what the people think.
I think what you’re seeing in China is not unlike what happened in Russia after the wall fell. You have a people that has been systematically deprived for so long, so when the doors are cracked open a little, the floodgates just open, and it just becomes this kind of outlaw capitalism, where anything that can get you paid goes.
I’m not at all surprised that the goods from China are shoddy. It’s not as if they have any real regulatory regime, other than if some commissar in the Party decides unilaterally that he doesn’t like the attention or whatever, then somebody gets shut down and thrown in prison. It’s simply an arbitrary system, and if you’re operating in an arbitrary system, you have little incentive to hew to some imaginary moral line - it’s simply whatever you can get away with.
If we want to bend it back to the US, I think its a good example of what potentially happens when the US decides that regulation is an annoyance, rather than an economically efficient way to protect consumers when the alternative, which is diffuse information with no clear collector, makes consumers effectively liable for tracking product failures with no effective means to do so. In other words, it’s your responsibility to figure out whether the tires on your car are dangerous, of which I can think of only two direct ways - have your car blow out and you get killed, or alternatively, you can personally commission a study of tire dealers around the country and ask them if their customers have had problems. And I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you if the product is faulty. Obviously, its ultimately not practical and requires a larger entity, presumably one with sanction power, to squeeze that information out into the public domain.
I think what you’re seeing in China is not unlike what happened in Russia after the wall fell. You have a people that has been systematically deprived for so long, so when the doors are cracked open a little, the floodgates just open, and it just becomes this kind of outlaw capitalism
I thought of that, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I think there’s a similarity between the two only in that neither one brings any of the ethical sensibilities that Dan mentioned to capitalism, and are thus engaged in a purer form of the system.
But China and post-Commie Russia differ in that China has a controlled economic strategy. It isn’t the wild west, so to speak, that Russia was in the aftermath of Communism. Sure, both are lax in regulations, but in China’s case, that represents a specific economic policy and tactic, while in Russia’s case, it was the absence of any economic policy that led to lax regulation.
“it just becomes this kind of outlaw capitalism, where anything that can get you paid goes.”
i’m not ascribing the same sort of blame to the 6-person chinese factory making folic acid in a 1000 square foot rectangle as i would to those engaging in the same behavior in a first world factory. i’m just saying this is the way it is, and americans have to either live with that, or they have to figure out what their response is.
political theory is more like a circle than a line, where the far left and far right converge, and that point of intersection is anarchy. this is one of those issues where the convergence is visible. though the theories may differ in their construction, protectionist right wingers and social justice / government protection left wingers will find common cause in dangerous chinese imports.
i agree with vitus that i think nothing will happen, that is, we’ll still keep getting shitty imports and we’ll just have to wait it out for a generation, hoping china first-world’s itself and develops processes to monitor their factories. but the press has got its teeth into this, and it’s going to be hard for politicians to hold their lines when the pics of sick and injured kids find their way onto major media.
I think you’re giving the Chinese wayyyy too much credit for being able to manage their economy. I think the chronology is somewhat clearer in the context of Tiananmen, which was sort of the shot across the bow of the Party to inform them that unless they opened up a little and improved people’s lives, they would be in for more.
The response was to open up to foreign investment, somewhat, and grant more private ownership of assets. That in turn led to more manufacturing, economic activity, urban migration, and wealth creation. However, it’s also led to crony capitalism, outlaw capitalism, and a real confusion as to what the law is, especially with regard to commercial activity. I think the pace of it has probably surprised the Party, and I think that they are just barely keeping up, seemingly a bit more concerned with civil control then they are with say, overall well-being.
They are helped, of course, by our unending appetite for cheap goods and willingness to buy from them, regardless of human rights abuses, corruption, lack of quality control, piracy, etc., and as such while I think its obviously been on balance good for both us and them, I would be cautious about being doctrinaire in our approach to trade with them, especially since I think they are much more interested in getting our intellectual property and know how then we are in getting cheap t-shirts and socks. In other words, I think we need to be extremely careful about what kind of skills and technology get exported over there. We’ve already seen that anybody, including bike manufacturers, who builds there ends up competing against their own managers who set up just down the road, with impunity. And that’s a relatively benign example.
I think you’re right in that I think the only way this gets worked out is with more dead people, to put it succinctly. The Chinese have no incentive to implement quality control other than whatever pressure we and other trading partners are willing to exert. If that means using bad PR and media, then I think that will be the means. Otherwise, in a purely capitalistic sense, they have no incentive to improve, and a very low likelihood of implementing any sort of non-corrupt regulatory regime.
I guess the easiest tack as consumers would be simply to avoid any goods that are so-called mission critical and are manufactured there with little stateside quality control. Which is another way of saying that I might wear a t-shirt made in China, but I’m not going to use toothpaste, tires, or for that matter, buy a condo in Shangai built by a Chinese construction company. Call me ethnocentric (and I’m Chinese), but I think some lessons are much better learned by watching others learn it directly, rather than having it happen to you.