Pre-Paris energy-cost-bearing squabbles

Nothing like a leftist meme based on a fantasy to bring actual human nature into sharp relief.

It seems that China and India, with the world's "developing nations" in tow, are rather miffed that the cost of achieving the big global-average-temperature goal to be set in stone at next month's climate pow-wow in Paris will be disproportionately borne by those developing nations. The argument goes something like, "You Western nations goofed up the global climate with your Industrial Revolution; you should have to bear most of the expense of addressing it."

The irony is that the only realistic way for these developing nations to - well, develop - is to use good old, dense, cheap and readily available energy forms just like the Western nations have done:

All issues that require collective action, especially on a global scale, are difficult to resolve because they suffer from the free-rider problem, i.e. some parties seek to benefit from the "common good" without springing for it. But as Oren Cass, a Manhattan Institute analyst, notes, fighting climate change is a particularly vexing problem because the individual cost to each country, especially Third World ones, will be immediate and huge — and the benefits distant and uncertain. The notion that emission cuts can pay for themselves through increased energy efficiency is at best fanciful and, at worst, a lie.

There are no low-carbon energy technologies available today that can sustain the economic growth rates these countries need to lift their people out of abject poverty, let alone offer Western living standards at anything resembling an affordable cost. Over 300 million Indians still live below the poverty line, earning less than $1 per day. India's per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than the United States'. India has to keep boosting its energy use — and therefore carbon emissions — for at least another two decades to eliminate dire poverty, which is why its reduction plan only commits to slashing "emission intensity" — its emission rate as a percentage of its GPD — not emissions themselves.

Even this much, India claims, will require up to a $2.5 trillion investment over the next 15 years in renewable energy sources and adaptation technologies. Even if that figure is exaggerated, clearly this would be a challenge for a country that has yet to offer basic sanitation, transportation, and clean-water infrastructure to all its citizens. 

So, from India on down the scale to Haiti, leaping over the part in the development story where societies use lots of fossil fuels to boost their standard of living, is a plainly insurmountable challenge.

And now we get to the heart of the matter. The only way the whole thing could really be straightened out so that everybody is on board with drastically changing the way the whole world lives in order to achieve a silly, completely unnecessary energy-use goal is to - you guessed it - bring the implicit use of force into the equation:

When there is abundant wealth to solve a problem, moral accounting matters less. Whoever has the means will often step forward without caring too much about responsibility or returns. That clearly is not the case with global warming. The stakes are high for everyone so each side will vehemently assert the morality of its position. But the one most likely to prevail is not necessarily the one with superior claims, but superior force. Might, after all, makes right.

Indeed, notes Cass, if climate change will unleash an eco-catastrophe as claimed, then the harsh reality is that it might be more cost-effective for America and the West to impose their will by military force. Trade sanctions against non-complying countries that are being considered in Paris won't cut it for the simple reason that developing countries can band together and impose countervailing sanctions of their own. The upshot will be a full-scale trade war that won't reduce emissions (although the economic attrition that'll result will help).

Hey, Paris attendees, here's an idea. It's an idea that has convenience, peace, prosperity - and, most of all, freedom - going for it.

Just let everybody obtain normal-people fossil fuels at prices determined by the free market.

Period. Just go with that. Since the global climate isn't in any kind of real trouble, actual problems such as sanitation and food supply and civil order could be addressed. Quickly and elegantly.

In a sane world, such a suggestion would look to everyone like the natural way forward. Alas, eventually, since we're so determined to base these decisions on an utter fantasy, the point of a gun will eventually enter the picture.