Oh I agree. This is the kind of effort that will be beneficial to those that actually undertake them, and we should still clean house first.

But they are sounding like the guy that has 5 planes who says that it does't matter because the other guy has had his 5 planes for longer. The past is what it is, but we (and, more to the point here, the Chinese, too) have to look at the present and the future too.

It's hard to say who is trying to stall (excpept for Bush, who obviously is). Everyone is trying to get the system to work to their greatest benefit or to match their preexisting political viewpoint.

The claim that the world should assign a per capita limit that is equal for all people may have some theoretic appeal as "just", but is obviously a deal killer. However, if yyou can convince Singapore, I'll go along.

The objective is a framework that can be agreed on, not that is right or wrong in the eyes of this or that ideology. It is going to come out looking like a compromise. Clearly the US and Europe are going to be able to emit more than poor countries with large populations, say Bangladesh.

In theory I am not opposed to a large-scale income redistribution, but I don't think we can allow it to highjack progress on climate change.

This is the argument George Bush tried to put forward and it is outrageous. It is saying because we are richer than you we demand the right to foul up the planet more than you. It is the mindset that continuous growth in GDP is inviolate that is the biggest psychological barrier to taking the steps needed to avert catastrophe.

Good question. My impression was that overall the European record was mixed, but better than the US. I did think that some individual European countries lagged the US.

I read an exchange in the Financial Times recently where an American claimed the US had done better than Europe, which was then refuted by a European who claimed every European country was ahead of the US in reducing emissions growth. To some degree this seemed to be two PR types with different calculations.

How did Brazil fall 2.5%. Did the period of measurement include a recession?

yes, capitalism and slavery.

imo, the us is no longer a capitalist country. more like a debtist country. (debt = capital anti-matter)

Thats a double whammy. Not only are American consumers responsible for 25% of all oil useage. They could well also be responsible for a not so small fraction of the rest! Ditto for coal. I'd never thought about it that way.

Marco.

So I guess Americans deserved to be punished by their corporate overlords eliminating their jobs and then taxing them on the outsourced products made by the people who had their jobs.

China keeps the factories and keeps the goods it produces for itself?

China might eventually go for that plan.

So I guess Americans deserved to be punished by their corporate overlords eliminating their jobs and then taxing them on the outsourced products made by the people who now have their jobs.

China keeps the factories and keeps the goods it produces for itself?

China might eventually go for that plan.

That quite overstates the situation. China's most energy intensive sectors--iron & steel and cement--are going full blast to build a country's worth of infrastructure and to urbanize another 300 million people. Making clothes for export or plastic furniture requires just a fraction compared to what they use themselves. Here's how coal is used in China, in million tonnes:

Don't you think the old communist system in
china was better than today's greedy
heavily-polluting force-fed capitalism as far as
habitat-saving is concerned?

Usually Communist countries were ecological disasters.

Certainly East Germany was horrible versus West. Communist ideology was certainly about massive physical development and grandiose industrial projects---the difference being that they often destroyed wealth rather than created it.

This is a heartbreaking situation for me.

Unlike a lot of people on this website, whom I suspect want the non-rich non-white mass of humanity to die off from Peak Oil, I want to see a radical redistribution of wealth to try to save as many lives as we can. I think that the capitalists won the Cold War by selling the myth of infinite growth. The Soviet bureaucracy couldn't compete with the energy unleashed by greed, but at some point capitalism must be judged for what it delivered, which was one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide, and very little poverty relief.

So now China, the only large area to move significant numbers of its people out of extreme poverty under the Reagan Empire, stands accused of ecocide for its success. And the foreign capitalists who exploited China to screw their own working classes and inflate the value of their stocks will wash their hands of the whole thing and switch back to the Cold War paradigm, with its eternal war and guaranteed defense contracts. The media will only tell us about carbon dioxide crimes from the countries that got rich by defying us, and cover up the crimes of the countries that stayed poor by signing indenture treaties like NAFTA and the Iraqi Oil Law.

This is messed up. We don't have to do it this way. But it means making deals with China based on what China thinks it deserves, not what the Wall Street Journal thinks it deserves.

China wants access to the world car market. It can make nasty cars that pollute. It can make cheap batteries. It lacks a guaranteed market for electric cars that would cause the cars and batteries to be combined. European engineers are working on lightweight cars that can pass crash tests, but their labor is too expensive to build them. Americans claim to require heavy V8 SUVs because nothing less is safe, then whine about $3 gas.

Seems to me that there's a way to work this out. Yes, it's a gross violation of capitalist norms, but it's less gross than World War III or a permanent depression.

Europe designs the cars. America designs the batteries.
China builds them, or at least their motors and batteries.
The world's automakers specify the features they want, and complete and sell the cars to meet global carbon quotas.
By treaty, signatory governments agree to coordinate their EV tax credits and subsidies, to restrict internal combustion cars from the most polluted cities, and to raise gas prices to a similar high level by taxation - to be offset by other tax cuts if the politicians want to survive.

Here's the kicker: China must agree to do all those things, and accept caps on its export growth. It is in its interest to give up its most primitive exports for this rare chance to move quickly into the lucrative US automotive sector, because that guarantees future earnings from making the spare parts. At the same time all these guarantees make the cars cheap enough that China can ban further production of IC cars. You heard me. Stop making them now before you become too hooked to stop. If you could ban all cats and dogs in Beijing, which China did, then you ought to be able to ban gas engines.

Now this shifts the C02 problem to electricity generation. A similar treaty will have to be made guaranteeing China a global market for its cheap windmills and solar-thermal units in exchange for China phasing out its own coal industry.

I know all this can be shot to pieces on the details. I'm just trying to show that the sheer size of the global warming and peak oil problems can't be solved without the kind of big-picture solutions which humans have reserved for the most serious matter: the political resolutions of major wars. The Congress of Vienna, the Treaty of Versailles, and the international acts sponsored by the US in 1944-45 rearranged borders, toppled political systems, and picked winners. Yet they were less disruptive than the wars that necessitated them. This time we're stuck having to voluntarily do all the disruptive things first to head off a mass destruction greater than the world wars. We can't do it without making huge concessions to the actors who have the power to do huge things. America has frittered away that power to special interests and a cult of privatization, until all we have left is our ability to create debt. We transferred the ability to make real things to China, with the accompanying waste. We will need a lot of real things built to replace our current energy system - but that means creating more CO2 in the short run. China will either generate that CO2 making crap for Wal-Mart, or making weapons to defend itself from future neocon schemes to control world oil, or making windmills and solar furnaces. We all know we can only survive one of these three outcomes.

There were a few comments in yesterday's Drumbeat.

... for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. -- Kurt Vonnegut

The world will certainly burn all the oil and gas---it's just too valuable.

We can actually do without the coal, if we switch immediately to as much of everything else as possible---which will at present be mostly uranium.

The world will certainly burn all the oil and gas---it's just too valuable.

We can actually do without the burning up all the coal---the real climate killer---if we switch immediately to as much of everything else as possible---which will at present be mostly uranium.