We should be more realistic and less condescending about climate change
I think poor countries should determine their own future
The New York Times is an incredible journalistic product, with fabulous reporters, especially international ones.
So here’s an article that I think is great, by those international reporters.
It’s about the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is planning to auction off a great deal of land for oil and gas investment.
I would urge you to read it—it is fascinating and well worth your time.
But despite it being excellently reported, it is written in a very disapproving tone towards this much poorer country for drilling and mining because of the effects these efforts will have on climate change. And I think this disapproval goes beyond the New York Times, and beyond disapproval, and I find it not only misplaced, but also unproductive.
Life is a lot harder in the global south
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the average income is $1,000 a year. And their poverty is not just monetary. These people’s lives are so much more infinitely harsh than yours or mine that it is almost unfathomable.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the infant mortality rate is about 1 in 15. Less than 20% of people have electricity. Only 13% of the population uses safely managed sanitation services.
Now I am sure that the NYT is correct here, that extracting oil and gas from Congolese peatlands will make the climate hotter and more difficult for human life.
But I guess where I am less sure is whether it is really the problem of a country where people make $60,000 a year what people who make $1,000 a year do with their lives. Of course, Congolese mining may make California fires or Florida hurricanes worse, but that’s not going to be the main effect!
The main effect is going to be more suffering for the Congolese!
I don’t think I have to try hard to convince you on this point, but the global poor will be most affected by climate change. Google “who will be most affected by climate change,” if you don’t believe me—maybe you’ll decide to click on this Time Magazine article or maybe if you prefer to hear from a charity, you’ll click on this list from Concern Worldwide. Both will tell you roughly the same thing: it is poor people in the Global South who will be most affected by climate change. It will be sub-Saharan Africans who make $1,000 a year, or maybe they’ll get lucky and it will instead be Haitians who make $3,000 a year, or maybe it’ll be both.
Here’s an image from Grist, if you like visuals:
But if by some unbelievable, supernatural occurrence, America was most affected by climate change, I still think we (the West) would be hypocrites to take this kind of posture.
For one, these lower-income countries don’t emit almost any carbon compared to the West. Here’s a map from Our World in Data about CO2 emissions per capita—the DRC (the big one in the middle of Africa) would need to drill quite a bit more to catch up to us. After all, we only emit 474 times as much as they do per capita.
The hypocrisy goes even further if you go into the historical. It seems rich for America to lecture the DRC on deforestation, when we used it for centuries to turn the eastern seaboard into the economic juggernaut that it is.
And it wasn’t just deforestation! We emitted extremely large amounts of carbon, and we did so increasingly until only very recently. Here’s that same map of global carbon emissions per capita, except this time it’s for 1920—we have been emitting infinitely more than the DRC for quite some time!
And is there any other way to develop?
I think there is not. Economies that get richer tend to do so in the following way: they start out with small-scale agriculture, then they begin to have more industrial production, then if they’re really successful, they get to have a more services-based economy.
The small-scale agricultural economy doesn’t emit much (like the DRC), the industrial economy emits a ton (think China), and then the services-based economy emits less than a fully industrial one, but a lot more than the small-scale agricultural one (law firms don’t have smokestacks, but they do have parking lots).
This is a different point than the observation that rich countries can grow richer without emitting more.
The same Our World in Data article that I have been citing repeatedly features this cool graph, demonstrating that the United States’ (or other rich countries’) economy has been able to grow while emissions have declined:
As the authors of the article put it, “These countries show that economic growth is not incompatible with reducing emissions.” But those countries are rich, and the graph starts in 1990! Yes, once you have much of the economy working as lawyers, doctors, hospitality staff, consultants, and even bloggers, it is easy to keep emissions down—just make some cheaper solar panels or whatever.
But this is how that graph looks for China:
And I think we should hope that the DRC ends up looking like China on the graph, because then tens of millions of poor people will be able to have better lives, and I don’t think that is going to be achieved with less emissions.
And it’s not just the tone of one article
The tone of that NYT article is the original impetus for writing this piece, and I think it serves as a good introduction here.
But the tone of the NYT article is really small, relative to everything else. There is genuinely a ton of international pressure put on very poor countries to not mine or drill and to instead declare that all their resource-rich lands are “protected” because the land is both really pretty and really good at sucking carbon out of the air. But it will be okay, as the theory goes, because Western countries will help them develop in cleaner ways, or maybe just pay them?
But for the most part, the money never comes, and even if it did, it would never be enough, so I don’t get why the West even bothers. Everybody in the DRC (average income = $1,000) wants to have the standard of living that everybody in America has (average income = $60,000). So as soon as the West raises approximately $5.3 trillion (90 million Congolese who each get $59,000 more) to give to Congo, you’ll find me convinced that all this international pressure is a good thing, and yes, we really should be attached to Congolese peatlands we have never heard of.
So what do we do?
I suppose this is where I become less sure. Below is a breakdown of total emissions by region:
As you can see, the West could lead by example and simply stop emitting any carbon at all, and all that effort would get rid of about 29% of global emissions.
Asia is not going to stop developing and emitting more because we tell them to. Africa is not going to stop wanting to emit—let’s hope they succeed. The soft hegemony of the United States is not going to stop them. The world will probably emit as much if not more in 10 years than it does now, if I had to guess.
And so here is where I think it matters a lot how bad you think climate change is. If you believe all that stuff that says Miami will soon be underwater, then I think you should really start fortifying Miami, or building whatever great system they have in the Netherlands for handling the fact that it too should be underwater.
If you don’t think Miami is going to be underwater, and you also don’t think we can condescend enough (or pay enough) to the global south to make them uninterested in developing, then I think, to the extent that you should worry about the environment, you should worry about pollution.
Pollution is a much more local problem. We can’t stop the vast majority of climate change simply because other countries want to emit, but Los Angeles can have clearer air, and it already does have much cleaner air than it used to. In 1981, Los Angeles had 160 days of unhealthy or hazardous air. In 2019, Los Angeles had 1 day that bad.
The whole country has much cleaner air than it used to—nobody worries about a Dust Bowl 2.0. And we can go even further. Pollution, unlike global climate disaster, is a problem Americans can, and really should, push politicians to act on. Even though it’s a lot better than it used to be, still tens of thousands of Americans die every year in deaths attributable to air pollution. We should push ahead, with electric cars, nuclear power, solar power, etc, knowing it will make America a more pretty and breathable place, whether or not it lowers global future temperatures by 0.1 or 0.3 degrees Celsius.
But let the Congolese manage their own peatlands.
good article marc