The Economist has a good rundown of the new study showing unchecked global warming will consume 5%-20% of worldwide GDP -- a catastrophic amount that makes preemptive measures a downright bargain. Relatedly, I was at an event yesterday uniting all manner of (small "e") economist types, many of whom spoke dreamily of the need for some national investment in innovative industries, most of whom thought renewable energy offered both the most promise and the most possible gain. That's certainly backed up by this graph, which sort of scares the hell out of me:
But how to slow China? Problem is, the work should've been done decades ago. Via Brad Plumer, this New York Review of Books piece tells the story:
Kelly Sims Gallagher, one of the savviest early analysts of climate policy, has devoted the last few years to understanding the Chinese energy transition. Now the director of the Energy Technology Innovation Project at Harvard's Kennedy School, she has just published a fascinating account of the rise of the Chinese auto industry. Her research makes it clear that neither American industry nor the American government did much of anything to point the Chinese away from our addiction to gas-guzzling technology; indeed, Detroit (and the Europeans and Japanese to a lesser extent) was happy to use decades-old designs and processes.
"Even though cleaner alternatives existed in the United States, relatively dirty automotive technologies were transferred to China," she writes. One result is the smog that is choking Chinese cities; another is the invisible but growing cloud of greenhouse gases, which come from tailpipes but even more from the coal-fired utilities springing up across China. In retrospect, historians are likely to conclude that the biggest environmental failure of the Bush administration was not that it did nothing to reduce the use of fossil fuels in America, but that it did nothing to help or pressure China to transform its own economy at a time when such intervention might have been decisive.
It's not that the decisions were incomprehensible at the time. Why would Detroit want to share advanced anti-pollution technologies given China's penchant for lax intellectua property regulation? But comprehensible though they were, they'll prove destructive shortly. The policy choices are dispiriting, here. While elites like the muse about gas taxes, I'd guess there's precisely no chance of one being passed into law. If we had a bipartisan accord where both parties unanimously endorsed such a program and thus dispersed blame and retribution, maybe. We don't. Investment in some sort of Apollo Alliance project would be a good move, both from a jobs and environmental perspective, but it's unclear how rapid the advances will be. So I trend towards the pessimistic side on all this, but who knows? Maybe 2008 will see the inagauration of President Gore, and everything will be different.
