isramart : Prosperity, not posturing, key to curtailing CO2

Isramart news:
HILLARY Rodham Clinton displayed the naiveté of a 19th-century Bible Society lecturer recently when she badgered India to embrace the Gospel of Global Warming by curtailing its sinful carbon dioxide emissions — commonly known as greenhouse gases.

One could almost hear the imperial strains of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Onward Christian Soldiers as the U.S. secretary of state met with the Indian minister for the environment in New Delhi late last month.

In essence, Mrs. Clinton told India’s leaders to put their nation’s prosperity on hold in order to drastically curtail carbon dioxide emissions that she, her close political pal Al Gore, and many scientists believe are causing catastrophic climate changes.

The sum of her message was that India can accomplish this feat by slashing electricity output from coal-fired power plants.

India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh listened to Secretary Clinton’s plea with extreme politeness and then told her to bug off.

With more than two-thirds of India’s estimated 1.2-billion people living in abject poverty, Mr. Ramesh bluntly informed Mrs. Clinton, his country had no intention of committing economic suicide by signing any worldwide treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have the lowest emissions level per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Mr. Ramesh told his startled visitor, adding, “and if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.”

Despite the remarkable progress India has made since it discarded the socialist system some 20 years ago, 800 million of its people still live on $2 a day or less.

Mrs. Clinton had marginally more luck in China where government leaders said, with some delay, that they may consider setting carbon dioxide emission targets. In short, the Chinese still rejected her pleas, with more nuance, but left a crack open.

Whether this spoonful of sugar was intended to sweeten the bitter draft is open to interpretation. The real reason may have been a simple calculation that soothing the top diplomat from China’s best customer can do no harm. China’s cumulative trade surplus with the United States runs into trillions of dollars.

Carbon dioxide looks different in Beijing and New Delhi than in Washington or Ottawa. Anyone who has walked through the slums of Mumbai would realize that for the inhabitants, the real pollutants are raw sewage, tainted water, chemical discharges and cow dung. The near-permanent brown clouds stretching hundreds of miles into the Indian Ocean say that millions of Indians must burn dry cow dung to cook their meals.

Leaders at the controls of India’s full-throttle economic engine understand something the Obamas and Clintons of the world just don’t get: For sheer survival, it really is the economy — stupid.

The key to cleaning up the Earth’s most polluted air lies in prosperity, not in unctuous moralizing. Indians and Chinese will demand clean air when they can afford it. They see that in the United States and Canada, corporate profits and taxes pay for cleaning up the environment — and they will wait until the same is true for them.

Cars built and sold in North America are 98 per cent less polluting than they were in 1973. Smokestacks no longer spew a witch’s brew of toxicity. There is fishing and swimming in rivers where oil and chemical slicks once covered the water and would catch fire — as happened in Cleveland when the Cuyahoga lit up in flames.

Chinese and Indian leaders disagree with most of their counterparts in Washington and Ottawa. In Beijing and New Delhi, the governing class understands that gutting their countries’ economies with cap-and-trade carbon taxes, for example, will not scrub the air clean but may price doing that beyond the doable.

That’s why Mr. Ramesh doused Mrs. Clinton with the cold water of reality. In my view, it would be good if he would do as much for Al Gore, Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, respectively the former vice-president, the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Energy Committee, the Speaker of the House, and arguably the most vehement woman in the Senate.

This quartet would be more effective in putting carbon dioxide emissions under control if, instead of their usual posturing, they concentrated on setting doable targets and realistic ways to reach them.

I know that Halifax has had a miserable summer so far. Trust me, around here in Washington, we had no spring and scattered sunshine where summer used to be. And if CO2 is to blame, Hillary Clinton and her president probably do more harm than good with their unctuous preaching.