The great global warming swindle

The West is running a protectionist racket against the developing world

Ross Clark

11 August 2007

The West’s new greenness conceals a giant protectionist racket

The International Energy Agency recently made the prediction that China’s carbon emissions would overtake America’s by 2009. That may or may not happen, but even if it does, it doesn’t quite mean that the Chinese are as culpable as Americans for carbon emissions, because it rather ignores the fact that China has five times the population. Head for head, in 2003 the Chinese emitted 3.2 tonnes of carbon and India 1.19 tonnes. The US, on the other hand, emitted 19.8 tonnes of carbon per capita. The UK emitted 9.4 tonnes, Germany 9.8 tonnes and France, which has a high proportion of energy generated by nuclear power, 6.4 tonnes. But even those figures are highly misleading, because they ignore the fact that much of China’s rising carbon emissions are being spewed out in the name of producing goods for Western consumers. These are emissions, of course, which used to come from chimneys in Birmingham and Manchester, before our manufacturing base was reduced to a shadow of what it was. If Britain meets its Kyoto target in 2012 (and it may well do), it won’t be because British consumers have made sacrifices to save the planet; it will be because we, like other Western nations, have exported a sizeable proportion of our carbon emissions to China.

Somehow, I doubt whether President Bush will recognise this at his conference in September. He won’t be suggesting, for example, that China be allowed to emit extra carbon emissions to compensate for the fact that the country now produces 43 per cent of the world’s cement. Neither will he be negotiating a target which would limit China to the same per-capita carbon emissions as the US. Rather he will attempt to make a deal which will effectively cap China’s emissions permanently at a fraction of those of the US. In other words his aim will be to institutionalise the gap in wealth between rich countries and poor ones, and give the US an inbuilt advantage against Chinese producers.