Climate bad boys: China, India and Russia

Three countries with more than forty percent of the world's population -- China, India and Russia -- dod not attend the recently completed Glasgow "climate conference." They're not interested, and they have good reasons to be opposed to the conference's goals, not just to decline to support them. The excerpts below, from a great column in Spiked, makes the reasoning pretty clear -- and justified.

According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), in 2019 China produced 11,504 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 emissions, more than double those of the US (5,107 Mt). India produced 2,563 Mt, dwarfing the 360 Mt produced by the UK and nearly as much as western, northern and southern Europe combined.

But these emerging economies are not to blame for our own mad pursuit of Net Zero. The central focus of government policies should be the enhancement of human existence, making the world a better place for people. That means creating the conditions for economic growth. This doesn’t mean we should blindly concrete over everything. We all appreciate the beauty of nature and want to preserve it where we can. But the needs of humanity must be the bottom line. Plus, the best way to preserve nature is to get richer and make the production of food, goods and energy as efficient as possible.

It is no surprise that fast-developing countries are focused on economic growth and reducing poverty. Take India. According to the World Bank, India’s population in 2020 was 1.38 billion people – just under 18 per cent of the world’s population. Whatever India does therefore has a big impact on the world. Depending on whose data you use, India has the fifth or sixth largest economy in nominal terms – with roughly the same GDP as the UK or France. Using the alternative measure of purchasing-power parity (PPP), which takes into account how much things cost in each country, India is the third-biggest economy in the world.

The obvious point, however, is that India’s economic output is spread among vast numbers of people. Using the PPP measure again and dividing by the number of people, we get an idea of GDP per capita. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures from April this year, the US has a GDP per capita of $68,309. Some European countries, like Denmark ($61,478) and the Netherlands ($60,461), do very well on this measure, too. The UK is a relative underperformer, with economic output of $47,089 per person.

What about the big, up-and-coming countries? China’s economy has come a long way in recent decades, but per head of population GDP is still just $18,931. It still has a lot of catching up to do. India’s position is even worse, with GDP per capita of just $7,333. Even taking into account that life is cheaper in India, economic output per person is less than one sixth of that in the UK.

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India’s future energy needs are huge:

‘Over the coming years, millions of Indian households are set to buy new appliances, air-conditioning units and vehicles. India will soon become the world’s most populous country, adding the equivalent of a city the size of Los Angeles to its urban population each year. To meet growth in electricity demand over the next 20 years, India will need to add a power system the size of the EU to what it has now.’

On a per capita basis, the three are relatively poor countries. To catch up with the rich countries, they need to adopt the policies and practices of the rich countries, namely capitalism, innovation, education and energy, and they find it necessary to be less than interested in the climate concerns of the wealthy countries.

First, the climate policies are not only expensive, they are not likely to be effective. And second, of import to the poor countries, the climate restrictions can be easily viewed as an effort by the rich to keep the poorer countries poor. China may have a large overall economy, but on a per capita basis, the vast majority of the Chinese are relatively poor. It is worse in India, with a population not much less than China. Together, India and China comprise about 2.6 billion people, a third of the people in the world.

Try as the rich countries may, and as virtue signaling as they want to be, these three 'bad boy' countries aren't listening.