Heating the political climate

Global warming will take its toll on human life to the tune of hundreds of thousands every year. According to John Broome — the chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford — these unfortunate victims of society's next big challenge will die by three main causes: heat waves, expansion of tropical diseases to temperate latitudes and increased flooding. And yet many of my fellow Ecology and Evolutionary Biology graduate students feel that the direct loss of life is a pittance in comparison with the indirect effects of global warming, such as the loss of ecosystem services caused by the devastation of the natural world and the social turmoil associated with the inundation of the many millions of homes by the rising oceans.

The politics of global change involves three challenges. In dealing with each of these, the United States government holds a stance that is both horrendously unjust and inherently flawed. The Bush stance to which I'm referring is the recent decision to withdraw completely from negotiations for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. By this international treaty, the Clinton administration had agreed to limit U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide — the largest anthropogenic contributor to global warming — to seven percent less than 1990 levels by 2007. Bush's decision directly contradicted an explicit campaign promise to limit national emissions of air pollutants, including carbon dioxide. This monumental decision enraged European Union leaders and humiliated Environmental Protection Agency administrator (and ex-N.J. Gov.) Christie Whitman, who had just stated publicly that Bush would implement the Kyoto Protocol.

The first flaw lies in Bush's justification for the decision, which is that the Protocol is unfair to the United States because it does not explicitly limit the emissions of developing nations, including China. The preposterous nature of this claim is seen by considering the details of the Protocol, which is structured to be unfairly generous to the United States.

The negotiations are focused on future emissions as a proportion of the 1990 emissions. The United States — with less than five percent of the world's population — emits 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Even if China were to double its emissions, it would still emit several times less per capita than the United States. As visiting ethics professor Dale Jamieson — who will give a talk on ethics and global warming next Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. in Guyot 10 — has pointed out, per capita emissions — not 1990 baseline rates — are the only defensible currency for negotiations on climate change.

Does the United States really expect developing countries to say, "Okay, since you have been polluting our atmosphere much more for much longer — and are the cause of many of the warming problems we are already experiencing and will experience for the next four decades — you should be allowed to continue at this rate. We will all equally limit growth in emissions. If your citizens don't purchase two cars each, we'll ensure that ours don't buy their first refrigerator." Get real!

The second flaw is the United States' denial of disparate abilities to limit emissions. The United States is the sole major player standing in the way of the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, which limits the emissions of all developed countries. But of the countries covered by the Protocol, the United States tops the rankings by wealth and by per capita emissions. It is much more difficult for countries that are already energy efficient to further increase their efficiency and for poorer countries to marshal the necessary resources for these important improvements. Yet the Bush Administration has the gall to claim that the United States cannot afford to risk any harm to its economy. The richest country in the world whines that it "cannot afford" to limit its emissions.

Also flawed were the American complaints that stalled the Kyoto negotiations. Among other complaints, the United States would not sign an agreement that did not take into account the balance between carbon emissions and carbon taken up by forests, for example. Princeton professor Steve Pacala has no qualms about unveiling this farce: we have carbon "sinks" (the opposite of sources) in secondary forests — forests that were cut down in the vast historical deforestation of the continent.

Now that developing nations are following our path of development by mining their natural resources to boost their economies — activities funded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — their actions will be criticized by the developed world for the emitted carbon and lost biodiversity. Meanwhile, the United States wants 'credit' for the carbon soaked up by forests growing once again — simply because agriculture is no longer profitable. The vacuum of historical sensitivity that allows the United States to clamor for contemporary credit for benefits derived from past crimes is quite paradoxical.

The United States is getting away with far too much. We cannot continue to pretend that our energy consumption and its concomitant carbon-dioxide emissions do not have serious implications outside our national boundaries. Republicans ask me what I am going to tell the American coal miners or auto workers who lose their jobs to stiffer environmental regulations. I will tell them truthfully that I sympathize with their losses. We should press the government to make policies that allow the economy to cope with global and local demands to minimize these American economic blows.

What are we going to tell our children when they spend thousands of dollars to prevent their children from contracting malaria as the plasmodium-carrying mosquitoes spread North? And what are we going to tell the many millions of Bangladeshis who will soon lose their lowland communities? I am going to tell them that I am deeply sorry and that I fought the good fight. I will tell them that I refused to act as an apologist for indefensible American policies. I will tell them that I refused to partake in discussion of the finer points of emissions trading or carbon sink credits without first pointing out that the very basis for discussion is deeply unjust.

This Earth Day, I am making a resolution not to legitimize Bush's despicable climate change position by accepting the paradoxical assumptions upon which it is based. I invite you to join me — for the sake of future generations and disenfranchised people everywhere. Kai M.A. Chan is an ecology and evolutionary biology graduate student from Toronto, Ontario. He can be reached at kaichan@princeton.edu.