What happened at Copenhagen .... is no surprise

I was off in Tanzania, without internet and phone access, during the climate change conference at Copenhagen.  One of the high school students in that village asked me, "Sorry sir, what is the purpose of the international conference in Denmark?"
(A clarification: almost always the students there used "sorry" to preface their questions.)

I was so tempted to give him the bottom line that I gave students in my classes last term: that the Copenhagen conference won't achieve a damn thing because:

• the US is way too weak to shape the global agenda, particularly thanks to the US owing China a huge chunk of change
• China will be a tough negotiator and won't yield an inch, and will not care for emission reductions
• India will cry poverty and seek sympathy, and will not be interested in any emission reductions
• the rest of the world will merely watch these unfold

Of course, I spun a different story for this curious Tanzanian student.
But then it has taken me this long to kind of get caught up with what happened when I was gone.  The piece in the Guardian sounds exactly like the script that I had offered up my students--I suppose I was correct for once!  Here is how the piece starts:

China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

I am not sure what to make of such a report.  Way too cinematic a report.  It almost makes me want to discount it entirely.  But, dammit, the description there is so much like what I told my students would happen!

China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

I am not going to deny the possibility of China doing what it reportedly did.  But, this narrative does conveniently overlook how the US did not want to do anything all these years.  It overlooks how the US was often the lone dissenter among the industrialized countries.  Oh well.  Back to the Guardian:

Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China's negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity ("equal rights to the atmosphere") in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.

Let it be the last time that you were fooled into thinking that China would play nice on global issues--it would only China were to gain relatively more than the rest of the countries.

A long time ago, when I was in grad school, in a serious academic conversation a classmate of mine--who was from China--gave me the bottom line: China is the center of the world.  And this was just about when Deng Xiaoping had barely uttered that "to get rich is glorious" ....

Welcome to the 21st century, folks. 

carbon emissions, and how to bypass them :-(

So, the Economist made me think about something that should have been pretty obvious to me, given that one of the topics I teach is the economic geography of resources. All these years I have been explaining to students how there is lots of oil under the North Sea, and how Norway is a huge oil exporter. And an exporter of natural gas too.
In other contexts, I have also talked about how Scandinavians value and cherish clean air, water, ....

Yet, I had completely failed to note the contradiction in Norway's image of cleanliness with its tremendously profitable exports--oil and natural gas--which are one hell of a polluter! What a moron, eh? Writes the Economist:

Yet for all its environmental piety, Norway is also a prodigious polluter. Its greenhouse-gas emissions have grown 15% since it adopted the carbon tax. They are still rising, and are likely to continue to do so until 2012, according to Mr Stoltenberg. As it is, Norway spews out more emissions per head than many other countries in Europe. And, in the eyes of many environmentalists, these statistics understate the damage Norway is doing to the atmosphere. It is the world’s third-biggest exporter of gas and fourth-biggest exporter of oil. The process of extracting these fuels from below the North Sea releases some greenhouse gases within Norway itself. But when the oil and gas Norway exports are burned abroad, they generate far more emissions.

Maybe Norway's situation is more a philosophical challenge than an economic one. It does remind me of accusations that Mother Teresa was accepting large donations from people who were renowned crooks. Her argument was that she didn't care who dropped what in the donation box!

But seriously, is it ethical to advocate for caring for the environment when the country exports a gazillion barrels of oil every year?

Well, that was a couple of days ago. And that was from a publication that is center-right. Another British publication, the Guardian, which never leans to the right, has an interesting news report--that

Britain's biggest polluting companies are abusing a European emissions trading scheme (ETS) designed to tackle global warming by cashing in their carbon credits in order to bolster ailing balance sheets.
The sell-off has helped trigger a collapse in the price of carbon, making it cheaper to burn high-carbon fossil fuels and leading to a fall in the number of clean energy projects.

The report adds:

The EU's emissions trading scheme was set up as a market solution to cut greenhouse gas pollution from industry. Polluters were issued with permits that can be traded between companies and countries as a way of encouraging an overall reduction in carbon output. However, companies are now cashing them in for their own financial benefit.

Up to €1bn-worth of carbon emissions permits are said to have been sold off in recent months as industrial companies see an opportunity to bring in funds at a time when their carbon output is expected to fall due to lower production.

Nothing makes sense anymore :-(