Left Flank

Skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg pities the demise of the Doha Round and the rise of sentiments fearing global warming at any cost.

When the Doha trade round was launched shortly after September 11, 2001, there was plenty of international goodwill. But a recent Financial Times/Harris poll in the US, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain found people nearly three times more likely to say that globalization is negative than positive.

Recently, the Copenhagen Consensus project gathered some of the world’s leading economists to decide how to do the most good for the planet in a world of finite resources. The panel ‫ including five Nobel laureates ‫ found that one of the single best actions the planet could take would be completing the Doha negotiations. They based their conclusions on new research for the Copenhagen Consensus project by Australian economist Kym Anderson.

Anderson showed that if developing countries cut their tariffs by the same proportion as high-income countries, and services and investment were also liberalized, the annual global gains could climb to $120 billion, with $17 billion going to the world's poorest countries by 2015.

This is a respectable sum, and certainly a benefit that the international community should try to achieve. But what we often fail to realize is that the story only starts here. As economies open up, as countries do what they do best, competition and innovation drive up rates of growth.

More competition means that previously sheltered companies must shape up and become more productive, innovating simply to survive. Having more open economies allows more trade in innovation, so that new companies can almost instantly use smart ideas from around the globe. Instead of every closed market having to re-invent the wheel, once is enough to get everyone’s economy going.

This means that over time, the advantage of moving toward freer trade grows dramatically bigger: the $120 billion benefit in 2015 grows to many trillions of dollars of annual benefits by the end of the century. And the benefits would increasingly accrue to the developing world, which would achieve the biggest boosts to growth rates.

We have seen three very visible cases of such growth boosts in three different decades. South Korea liberalized trade in 1965, Chile in 1974, and India in 1991; all saw annual growth rates increase by several percentage points thereafter.

If we recast these benefits as annual installments, a realistic Doha outcome could increase global income by more than $3 trillion every year throughout this century. And about $2.5 trillion annually would go to today’s developing countries every year, or $500 a year on average for each individual in the third world, almost half of whom now survive on less than $2 a day.

There would, of course, be costs. Freer trade would force some industries to downsize or close, although more industries would expand, and for some people and communities, the transition would be difficult. Yet the overall benefits of a successful Doha Round would likely be hundreds of times greater than these costs.

It is interesting to contrast global skepticism about free trade with support for expensive, inefficient methods to combat global warming. Many argue that we should act, even if such action will have no benefit for the next decades, because it will help lessen the impact of global warming by the century’s end.

But free trade also promises few benefits now and huge benefits in the future. Moreover, if we could stop global warming (which we can’t), the benefit for future generations would be one-tenth or less of the benefit of freer trade (which we certainly can achieve). Still, there are few celebrity campaigners calling on politicians to sort out the Doha Round.

Global fear about free trade leaves the planet at risk of missing out on the extraordinary benefits that it offers. Free trade is good not only for big corporations, or for job growth. It is simply good.

Joseph S. Nye argues that technological fixes in any one country are not enough to reduce emissions.

There are two basic instruments to reduce carbon emissions and thus mitigate global warming. Technological innovation and increased energy efficiency have considerable potential. For example, carbon sequestration allows the capture and storage of carbon in underground geological formations and deep oceans. Thus, less CO2 gets released into the atmosphere.

But technological innovation alone is unlikely to be sufficient. The other basic instrument includes economic incentives and disincentives. The so-called emissions trading system aims to control carbon emissions by allocating tradable permits. A carbon tax has also been proposed as a method to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.

Not everyone will embrace such instruments. In 2007, China surpassed the US as the world’s leading CO2 emitter. But China points out that on a per capita basis, US emissions are five times higher. China, India, and other countries argue that economic development in rich countries caused most of the existing problem, and it is only fair that developing countries should not have to reduce their emissions until they reach the rich countries’ levels of emissions. But this is a formula for global disaster. The world’s climate is affected by total emissions, regardless of their origin.

China uses coal, a particularly CO2-intensive fuel, for 70% of its commercial energy supply, while coal accounts for a third of America’s total energy. China is now estimated to build two new coal-fired power plants each week.

Coal is cheap and widely available in China, which is important as the country scrambles for energy resources to keep its many energy-intensive industries running. Given that the bombs, bullets, and embargoes of traditional security policy are irrelevant, what can the US and other rich countries do about this security threat?

A 2007 report from the International Energy Agency (created after the 1973 oil crisis to provide policy advice to industrial countries) urged a cooperative approach to helping China and India become more energy efficient. In other words, to prevent dangerous climate change and promote their own security, the US and other rich countries may have to forge a partnership with China, India, and others to develop creative ideas, technologies, and policies.

It'll be a sad day for a Marylander when Bangladesh landmass grows. and Maryland's coastal areas shrinks, all because of global warming.

Yet, looking at the two unrelated reports from which these dire predictions are lifted, I wonder who's really alarmed, or if there's cause for alarm.

Mr Sarkar said that in the next 50 years this could add up to the country gaining 1,000 square kilometres.

But others maintain that Bangladesh is going to lose land over that period.

Dr Atiq Rahman, a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told the BBC that there was little in the new research to make him think that their projection needed revising.

He said that many people living along the coast had observed that sea levels where higher now than in their grandparents' day.

«The rate at which sediment is deposited and new land is created is much slower than the rate at which climate change and sea level rises are taking place,» he said.

So while some new land may be created in parts of the country, elsewhere a much larger amount of land will disappear, he said.

Push, pull?

As temperatures climb, cool-water northern species in the Chesapeake estuary, such as soft-shell clams, sturgeon and eelgrass, are likely to disappear, while warm-water species - such as Atlantic croaker - would benefit. Crabs might prosper from higher salinity and warmer temperatures.

«Summertime water temperatures are likely to be similar to those of the North Carolina sounds by 2050,» the panel said.

By 2100, they'll feel like South Florida.

With added runoff, that will expand «dead» zones, where nutrients in sediments lead to algae blooms, decay and reductions in dissolved oxygen.

On the plus side: Icing across the Chesapeake Bay - formerly a once-in-10-years event - may become as rare as once in 25 to 40 years, the committee said. That could aid oystermen and bay navigation.

Why do both reports sound like pork-barrel legislation written by lobbyists?

Realizing the G8 summit would be a farcical disappointment, I refrained from knocking the dearth of blogging I committed to it. Yet, even my low expectations were cut down at their knees.

To Yasuo Fukuda, Japan's prime minister, whose domestic standing is extremely shaky, the summit's smooth passage was a huge relief. He even showed a flash of statesmanship. In answer to perennial criticism that the G8, a self-appointed steering group for global problems, was hardly representative of the world, he invited seven national leaders from Africa to join Japan, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia to discuss the continent's development.

At another point, Russia's Dmitry Medvedev found himself hobnobbing not only with the old-time capitalist club but also with fellow leaders (see picture) of the BRIC gang of fast-growing giants—in other words, his counterparts from Brazil, India and China. By inviting that lot, plus Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia, the Japanese were able to bring together the bulk of the world's greenhouse-gas emitters. This was easily the G8's biggest «outreach» to date, and Mr Fukuda skilfully ensured that disagreements among that disparate bunch did not break out angrily into the open. Carry on like that, people at the summit quipped, and the 71-year-old leader might one day make a competent foreign minister.

(...)

The big disappointment was over climate change—despite some word games. Last year, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, overcame the reluctance of George Bush and got the G8 to promise to «consider seriously» cutting greenhouse emissions by at least half by 2050. This time the G8 vowed to «consider and adopt» such cuts. Ms Merkel hailed this tighter language; the hosts called it the summit's biggest victory, coming just 18 months before 180 countries meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol. In effect, Mr Bush has at last committed America to a quantifiable target. With just 200-odd days of his presidency to run, this may be his final input to the climate-change debate; some would call it his only contribution.

Yet the strength of the G8's commitment starts to crumble under scrutiny—even without one cynical Russian diplomat pointing out how absurd it is for today's politicians to take responsibility for meeting goals four decades from now. The baseline from which the cuts are supposed to occur has been left vague. The European Union wants them to begin from 1990, while Japan (which unilaterally says it will aim for a 60-80% cut in emissions) thinks it more realistic to start from 2005 or perhaps this year. America hardly has an opinion.

To some, this obsession with distant targets is beside the point. The G8 could not come up even with nearer-term goals to cut emissions—say, by 2020. The lack of more immediate and concrete measures, says Michael Grubb of the Carbon Trust, set up by the British government to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, underscores an «abdication of responsibility». At the least, he says, the G8 leaders could have promised to treat cuts eventually agreed under UN auspices as legally binding. And they could have moved to bring the huge, dirty market in bunker fuel for shipping and aviation, hitherto excluded from discussion of caps, into the negotiations.

Without such marks of resolve, it is little wonder that the five biggest developing polluters, which account for a smallish amount of the man-made carbon dioxide now clogging the air but a fast increasing share of new emissions, refused to make any firm pledges. A Japanese diplomat worries that the relationship between the G8 and the so-called G5 (India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) over climate change may soon resemble management-and-labour stand-offs at their worst.

But then, how could the world's leaders beat the Bush administration and the EPA for sheer skill at political shenanigans.

The reason why I'm lately obsessed with disasters, like the earthquake in PRC and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, is rewarded by Ross Douthat's post questioning liberal international hawks...

...offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

I have two problems.

Firstly, interventionism, as manifest in R2P, is the flip side of gunboat diplomacy, which to work requires a substantive military threat lurking over the horizon. Many more states would be willing to call America's bluff here, and so, the risk of appearing weak increases.

Secondly, the emphasis is wrong. It's not, in these two cases, that the CCP or SPDC are despotic, or even completely incompetent. According to Art Lerner-Lam in Foreign Policy, "[t]he Chinese have a very sophisticated system of response, even relative to global standards. They rely heavily on their military, and they have a large civilian component of engineers and scientists who assist. The problem is not with the system, but with the particulars of this event." The problem, then, is, that a disaster occurred. The international community needs to ask, why did a disaster occur? The answer is not primarily military, but is extremely political.

FP: There have been a number of natural disasters in East and Southeast Asia in recent months. Is this region particularly susceptible to disasters compared with others, and will it become increasingly so in the years to come?

(Art Lerner-Lam) ALL: To answer your first question, yes. East, South, and Southeast Asia are all highly susceptible and have what we call a multi-hazard risk profile. They are subjected to typhoons, cyclones, flooding, earthquakes, landslides, and in the case of Indonesia, volcanoes. From a geographic perspective, [these regions] are very susceptible to a whole range of hazards.

Whether the risk is increasing depends on two factors. One, are the hazards themselves increasing in frequency or severity? And two, are people becoming increasingly vulnerable in terms of population density and infrastructure? In the first case, you have to be a bit careful. We are not seeing increases in geological disasters such as earthquakes; you wouldn't expect that. Those are geological processes, so the rate of occurrence should be somewhat consistent over time. But with sea-level rise, which we accrue to global warming, there is some potential for there to be an increase in cyclones.

But the changes in the natural frequency and severity of hazards are dwarfed by the changes in urbanization and construction practices. The key issues in vulnerability are related to social, economic, and political factors more than they are to the geographic factors: building cities near coastlines, improper construction, having institutions that are incapable of understanding the magnitude of a disaster and putting together a response—Myanmar being a case in point. You can attribute most of the increase in disaster losses to changes in the patterns of development.

In other words, the SPDC's human rights record and its development record are two separate issues. ANY government that allows urbanization and hyper-density in high risks areas is in a sense irresponsible, These problems are geological and climatological. The UN, or the US or France, can condemn Yangon for slaughtering Karen. But, until any government devises a way to avoid setting poorer humans atop a veritable time bomb of questionable terrestrial real estate, it needs to stop wagging fingers. There are thornier issues involved here than gunboat diplomacy. There is no way to compare PRC's response to the American response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, because no one has done well addressing the fundamental issue of why so many people would want to live in areas no sane animal would want to squat on.

Again, one can question how Beijing treats Tibetans, or the SPDC treats most of its population. But, it's convenient hypocrisy to pass moral judgment on any government whose territory includes dirt of marginal, or even, dangerous, quality, when no one is brave enough to question why unfortunate people just have to live in hell, and on top it, have to endure a spectacle of fortunate, so-called educated people yelling over their struggling heads ignoring them.

Liberal hawks vs. neocons vs. realists...old quarrel! The relic of a pampered elite in a golden age. Move on!