What does China want ? It wants what we have by doing what we did.

(Source : Edmonton Sun)

No China ? No Kyoto

Getting world’s biggest carbon emitter on board will be tough

If there’s one good thing about holding the Olympics in Beijing, it’s that the whole world is seeing first-hand the lunacy of exempting China from having to remove a single molecule of carbon dioxide from its greenhouse gas emissions for the life of the Kyoto accord.

That haze clinging to Beijing pending tomorrow’s official start of the Summer Games is an example of what happens when you burn coal, oil and natural gas indiscriminately, using outdated technology.

Ironically, while it has western athletes and media freaking out, despite the best efforts of China’s totalitarian rulers to temporarily clear it by shutting down industries and arbitrarily curtailing traffic — things democracies can’t do — Beijing’s awful air isn’t the result of greenhouse gas emissions.

Rather, it’s an example of good old-fashioned air pollution — smog — a different problem which kills millions of people prematurely every year.

But if you’ve got runaway smog, it means you’ve also got runaway greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, since both are byproducts of burning fossil fuels.

That said, they require separate solutions — which confuses many politicians.

For example, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty hardly talks anymore about the pollution pumped out by his province’s four coal-fired energy plants, including the giant Nanticoke facility — one of North America’s biggest smog and greenhouse gas producers.

This even though he promised in the 2003 election, which he won, to shut them all by last year because, as he put it five years ago, "smog kills 1,900 Ontarians every year."

At the time, McGuinty himself called the Nanticoke power station "the dirtiest in North America." But apparently he didn’t know a thing about global warming, judging from the fact he didn’t mention it in his now-abandoned pledge to shut down the four coal-fired plants.

And yet today, McGuinty says he’ll close them by 2014 — maybe — but that it would be pointless to invest in anti-pollution scrubbers to reduce their smog emissions because that won’t also reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, linked to global warming.

While true (unlike air pollution, practical technology for carbon capture doesn’t yet exist), this argument is totally disingenuous.

Refusing to reduce air pollution by arguing it won’t simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions may pass muster with political partisans who owe their jobs to McGuinty.

But it’s apt to get a chillier reception from parents of kids with asthma or seniors with compromised respiratory systems.

In the real world, air pollution is caused primarily by the emission of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and other pollutants, when fossil fuels are burned.

At the same time, burning fossil fuels also releases greenhouse gases, led by carbon dioxide.

Not only are these two problems separate, simply reducing pollution without addressing greenhouse gases could actually increase global warming.

In other words, it’s complicated. (Don’t tell our politicians.) Here’s something else that’s complicated.

Before we get too self-righteous about China’s dismal environmental record, remember that the skies over Beijing today look much like those over any major industrialized city in the West less than a century ago.

That’s because China is trying to do what we did back then — use fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy to dramatically raise its standard of living — to power 1.3 billion people out of the Third World and into the First.

DOING WHAT WE DID

What does China want ? It wants what we have by doing what we did.

And its rulers aren’t much interested in lectures from us about why they should stop.

Indeed, if Kyoto’s supporters want their next treaty, which would take effect in 2013, to actually reduce global greenhouse gas emissions — because right now, it’s raising them — they had better have a convincing answer for China about why it should play ball with us.

Because while China today is the world’s largest carbon emitter, we in the industrialized West are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions to date.

See what I mean about complicated ?

LORRIE GOLDSTEIN