This article in the NY Times explains why making progress on climate change will be enormously difficult. China and the United States are jointly responsible for about 40% of the world’s greenhouse gases. So any solution must involve both countries.
The Chinese continue to resist mandatory ceilings on their emissions and are making financial and environmental demands on the United States that are political roadblocks.
The United States, despite optimistic words from the White House and Congress, has yet to enact any binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions. The energy bill now before Congress proposes emissions targets that are far short of what China and other nations say they expect of the United States.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that both countries are struggling economically and the Chinese and American publics appear far more interested in jobs than in tackling environmental problems, a task that would necessarily be costly. […]
As a measure of how far apart the two nations are, China says the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The bill before Congress, which could be further weakened, now calls for less than a 4 percent reduction over that period.
The Chinese have begun to consider a series of unilateral actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, stepping up production of renewable electricity and increasing the efficiency of their manufacturing, buildings and vehicles. But Beijing insists it will not sacrifice China’s economy to meet the demands of outsiders, particularly those in the developed world that are responsible for the vast majority of human-caused carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.[…]
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who led a delegation of lawmakers to China at the end of May, said in an interview that she was hopeful about the dialogue between the two countries, but fearful that they would fall into the old trap of hiding behind each other.
“They told us if we’re not going to do something, they’re not going to do anything,” she said. “Some of the people we talked to there said we should do more. I think we should do more, too. But we all have to go down this path together.”
So we have what social scientists call a prisoner’s dilemma here. If neither cooperates on solving the problem of climate change they both avoid the cost of developing clean energy but run the risk of self-immolation. Both fail in their goal. If one country cooperates and the other doesn’t, the country that cooperates incurs the cost of solving the problem, without actually solving the problem—it is a failure and a sucker as well. Clearly both countries would benefit from cooperation but both sides want to avoid being suckers.
So what to do? Solutions to prisoner’s dilemma problems require willingness on the part of one participant to take a risk and trust that the other side will respond in kind. The only solution to the problem of climate change is a real commitment from both China and the U.S. to solve it. And we have more influence over China if we unilaterally make the commitment.
If we make that commitment and China does not respond we get less CO2 reduction than we need, although some is better than none. But China loses too—their pollution problem is enormous and is a direct threat to their prosperity. It would be completely irrational on their part to ignore the problem—and I doubt that China’s leaders are irrational. There is little reason to think they will not follow our lead.
If we don’t make the commitment, then saving the cost of CO2 reduction will matter little because the consequences of doing nothing will be catastrophic. The changes we must make now might be difficult but they pale in comparison to the changes we will have to make in 20 years if we don’t act.
The only rational policy for the United States is to bargain with the Chinese to get the best deal we can, but in the end commit to CO2 reduction regardless of what China does, and use our moral authority to persuade them to do more.
