Folly

Peter Ford of The Christian Science Monitor dishes on China's slowly changing position on greenhouse emissions.

"Climate change has become a huge challenge to China's social and economic sustained development," Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said Monday. "China is determined to mitigate and respond to climate change as a responsible nation."...

At the same time, China's first Climate Change Assessment Report, dated September 2006 but broadly distributed last weekend, rejects obligatory ceilings.       

"If we prematurely assume responsibilities for mandatory greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, the direct consequence will be to constrain China's current energy and manufacturing industries and weaken the competitiveness of Chinese products," the report warns, adding that, "For a considerable time to come, developing the economy and improving people's lives remains the country's primary task."

While I've long argued that it's an immoral dodge to use China's unhealthy emissions levels as an excuse not to limit our own, China's emissions are in and of themselves a problem. And I've gotta say, the news out of China always dispirits me, because it invariably hints at the idea that China will only get serious about global warming once the economic costs of not getting serious about global warming outweigh the economic costs of getting serious about global warming. 

It would be nice if climate change worked that way--if all developing nations could build their economies steroid-like on coal and then, at the moment things got too hot, drastically cut emissions. But, since the impact of emissions on temperature take time to manifest themselves, once we've reached that point, we are by definition too late.