Global climate change is largely a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, which dump CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere, right?

What if the problem is your lack on hygene? Get on that, will you?

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, wrote a piece on oil and energy politics, a topic recently discussed in this blog.

Friedman is not always the best at putting together well-reasoned arguments, but this one makes some sense to me, probably because I already agreed with it. His point, hidden by inflammatory rhetoric, is that importation of oil funds a bunch of questionable people doing questionable things possible including terrorism; conservation is therefore helping to rid the world of terrorists.

And while I don't necessarily agree with some of his ideas to promote conservation, it's certainly true that if the government wanted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, by far the best thing to do is reduce our consumption (as opposed to drilling in Alaska, for instance -- the proposed drilling in Alaska would find enough oil to cover about a day's worth of domestic oil consumption).

Patrissimo suggested in a reply to my last blog entry that worrying about global warming is not a worthwhile exercise. In his words:

While the US and other 1st world countries are currently major contributors, the main contributors to global warming in the 21st century are going to be developing countries like India and China. The richer nations tend to use more efficient and less polluting power sources. China right now is incredibly hungry for cheap power and cheap cars, and if you extrapolate the graphs in what I think is a pretty reasonable way, their greenhouse gas production is going to dwarf ours this century. It's part of the industrialization process, and India is going to do the same thing a little later.

So convincing americans to cut down on burning fossil fuels is irrelevant.

The facts are pretty much right. The conclusions are dead wrong.

China and India are moving to the forefront of greenhouse gas emissions, and will pass the United States in the next 30 years, as will Brazil. But this does not mean that there isn't anything to be done, but rather that there's lots of work to be done in China.

I realize that this doesn't directly address Patrissimo's point, but here's a little bit of data about China which may be surprising. First, China's CO2 output actually fell between 1996 and 2000, even though its economy grew by 36%. This is due in large part because China is very serious about changing the way they produce energy -- they rapidly switched from a coal-based economy to an oil and hydro one. Because of the unusually bad way that coal was being used until the mid nineties, there was a huge space for improvement -- sort of low hanging emissions fruit, if you will. But still, China made and continues to make huge strides in controlling emissions, in part because of programs from the Energy Foundation in partnership with the Packard Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation.

In other words, work on greenhouse gas emissions in places like China is proceeding, and meeting with much greater success than efforts here. India is a harder situation, though. While they also have a bunch of very energy inefficient systems like burning wood for fuel, which could relatively easily and cheaply be replaced by for instance biodiesel creation systems that use that same wood, India is politically much less tractable than China. China has a very strong central government, and if it decides to do something, it will get done.

In India, though, you have to deal with the states directly, and it's very hard to get any kind of real change through the bureaucracy. This is in large part due to the incredible energy subsidies that farmers get. In order to get real change, you need to convince farmers that it's better for them to pay some small amount to get reliable energy rather than continue with the current system of free energy for them that is very unreliable. That will be a tough sell, but India is due some political upheaval anyway.

Brazil is another interesting place. There, greenhouse gas emissions are in large part due to slash and burn deforestation. This is another tractable problem -- right now there are laws on Brazil's books to prevent that sort of thing, but they aren't enforced. That is changing, but slowly -- it's a good opportunity here in the US, though, because it combines two environmental issues into one shiny attractive one. Save the rainforests and you save the world!

So far, I've pretty much supported Patrissimo's main point, which is that greenhouse gas solutions need to look at the major countries in the developing world. I agree with that. However, solutions for those countries become much easier when there are cheap technologies that allow for energy efficiency. Hybrids are great for developing countries because gas is a relatively larger part of a car owner's income, so better gas mileage is more desirable.

Why is that relevant? Because efficient technologies get created in first world countries in response to first world market forces. Hybrids will become cheap enough for the chinese market only if early adopters support them here. Similarly, green technologies like hydro and solar power also become cheaper as research into them is done by first world countries. So raising awareness of global warming and convincing americans to drive hybrids, support scrubbing technologies on factories, and so on really does make a difference. Not just in the value of the CO2 kept out of the atmosphere by Americans, but by creating a market for the technologies that we'll need in the next century to help the rest of the world keep emissions down as well.

Lastly, if we do manage to clean up our act in the US, that gives us a much firmer pulpit from which to preach environmental cleanliness to the rest of the world. Diplomacy is really hard when you look like a hypocrit.

All of which is to say that yes, major sources of greenhouse gas emissions will be coming from developing countries in the next century. But I think that that actually gives cause to work harder here on technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not a license to blow off working on the problem because we won't be the only people contributing to it in years to come.

Hubert pointed me to this story by Slate about why neocons are becoming concerned about fuel efficiency.

Basically, they think that importing oil from a bunch of countries that more or less consider us to be enemies is a bad idea, that it gives those companies power over us. This is certainly true to an extent -- if nothing else, it entangles them with us.

In general, lots of hard line conservatives come from the Bush "economy at all costs, conservation hurts business" mold. It's nice to see that some of the neocons are not sticking to party lines that they disagree with, and even taking a stand on issues where they are likely to catch flack from their allies when they think it's in the best interest of the country.

I wonder if there are other lefty issues that similar arguments could work for. I'm thinking specifically of other environment issues, since one should build on success, right? What about global warming?

If some of the recent reports about global warming and the looming problems are correct, then runaway climate change will have huge geopolitical consequences. Even if the most dire predictions don't come true, there will certainly be impacts, from the trivial to the profound.

Those effects will at the minimum cause a large scale disruption in breadbasket locations worldwide -- places that are now excellent for farming will become too arid, and places that are too cold now will become ideal. Combine that with global changes in rainfall patterns, and it is impossible to predict where food will be available in the decades to come. That fact alone is enough to cause large migrations and wars -- in other words, global instability. Bad for US security.

I realize that the naysayers towards global warming aren't going to be convinced by that sort of argument, but I wonder if there are those who don't necessarily refuse to believe evidence in support of climate change, but rather don't see what the big deal is. To them, maybe a goepolitical security-based argument might hold some sway.