Finding the Middle Way on China

Definition of "China" in "Jargon Watch" (solveclimate.com)

The best way to understand the role of China in America's global warming debate is to understand the function it plays in the national psyche. Here's one analysis.

America has made China the victim of its own psychological projection, a defense mechanism in which one blames others for one's own unacceptable attributes.

So rather than take responsibility for being far and away the world's biggest global warming polluters on a per capita basis, Americans have been duped into pointing the finger at China.

The average American is responsible for six times more greenhouse gas emissions than the average Chinese person. It's an inconvenient fact so uncomfortable that the response is to blame the Chinese instead.

Here's another one: all those coal plants and carbon emissions in China? A substantial chunk of that pollution is produced in order to supply the goods to feed the insatiable demand of American consumer culture. Whose emissions are they, really? Read this report from the Tyndall Centre on Climate Change Research called "Who Owns China's Carbon Emissions?" for an answer.

This is not to deny that China must be an important part of solving climate globally; but it is going to be impossible to engage in mature diplomatic discussions unless we stop blaming China for our own faults.


Response:

I'm a little irritated by your note on 'China' in the jargon watch. The reason the average Chinese person produces on sixth of the carbon the average American does is because so many of them are peasants without cars, electronics or large houses. As more and more Chinese people move into the middle class, they are beggining to assume those things, however, and we're all worse off for it.

The United States has such a large carbon footprint because we developed before they did, at a time when the mal effects of our built environment and our consumerism were largely invisible. It's not a crime that we developed first, it's just an accident of history (a fact which Jim Hansen was at least keen to point out in his much-publicized letter to the Australian President). Now that the effects are known, well documented and widely understood, inaction has moral consequences, but that applies to both side of the Pacific. Owning two cars and having a large house is not a human right, despite what many people seem to be suggesting about China's right to development. China needs to grow in such a way that it does not bring the rest of the world down with it. If Greenland melts, in part, because an ucompromising Chinese middle class insisted on having its 'American lifestyle', then the rationale that we got our chance and now they should to will not hold water, and it certainly won't hold ice.

As for your comment that China's Co2 expenditures exist in large part to drive the American 'consumer culture', while this may true, it's true for a number of reasons, again, on both sides of the Pacific. That the Chinese state insists on articially lowering the value of the Yuan to make Chinese exports cheaper certainly does not help. America, plauged by a dissapearing middle class that's now in the midst of recession, shops at Wal Mart because its cheaper - often the only way to get the things it needs (much less the things it wants) at all. Had China not taken it upon itself to obliterate American industry with its own versions of material goods through years of dumping, monetary inflation, and suppression of human rights and, yes, environmental norms to make its exports cheaper, there might be an industrial sector in the United States now which the government and the American consumer could have pressured into adopting stricter environmental regulations. Despite what you might inform us, that all of our stuff is produced in China is not something that any American willingly chose, except incrementally, over years, through their own consumer choices, which, again, we should all be more sympathetic to.

That the Chinese government can make decisions on a whim without the burden of a democratic legislature and the long, drawn out process of passing bills, which, by its very nature requires that the concerns of all parties involved (including economic powerhouses such as polluting corporations) be considered, means that the Chinese state has a power to do things which the United States does not. Instead of building freeways they could build wind farms. Instead of making large houses for the rapidly expanding middle class built with no regard for the environmental impact they induce, they could do the opposite. I recognize that the Chinese state is doing some things right. They are arguably more aware of the potential of global warming than any other globally significant international power. But if they fulfill their plans for building as many coal plants as they have already proposed, then the whole world is in very, very big trouble. Would you really blame the American consumer, strapped for cash, with family in other parts of the country who he has to fly to see, a job that's an hour's commute away by car, and a big house from another time when the economy was good and when global warming was a fringe science that he can't sell now? We all have certain capabilities within our power to do good. Some of us can change light bulbs, buy local, drive less and keep our tires inflated, and across America, this is exactly what people are doing. Others can level entire villages and build a wind farm there. Those who can do the latter have lately tended to build coal plants instead. China has the power. Americans can't shoulder the blame all by ourselves any more any more than we can shovel the responsibility. This is their job, and ours as well, and neither should hide behind the cloak of denial any longer.