Penalizing U.S. Manufacturing Will Only Increase Emissions and Slow Economic Recovery
By Kevin L. Kearns
and Alan Tonelson
of
There’s a dangerous contradiction at the heart of the climate change anxiety that’s become so pervasive in Washington, especially since the Obama administration came to town. On one hand, the doomsayers warn that man-made global warming is such an indisputable, imminent, and overwhelming threat, that human civilization must be transformed immediately to avert catastrophe. On the other hand, the climate change legions – including the European branch – keep ignoring the one initiative that could achieve the swiftest reversal: dramatically shrinking China’s greenhouse gas-belching, government-sponsored, industrial export machine.
In fact, the doomsayers seem strangely fixated on overcoming any climate crisis mainly by imposing greater burdens on a U.S. manufacturing base that is already very efficient but still cutting emissions substantially – even in the face of recession and unfair foreign, especially Chinese, competition. And they keep coddling Beijing -- despite the accelerating growth China’s emissions, and signs of its growing unwillingness to reverse the trend.
It’s as though a perverse, anti-American manufacturing attitude infects the nation’s capital. Few seem able to connect the dots between a sustainable, production-led economic recovery and a healthy manufacturing base. Washington has been so obsessed with the banks that it has paid scant attention to the extreme crisis in manufacturing; and it is manufacturing, not banking, that can actually create the plants, jobs, technology, products, and widespread wealth necessary for recovery – and do so in a climate-conscious way.
Without increased domestic manufacturing, the country will return (no matter how much stimulus money is printed) to its old habit of destructive over-consumption of foreign goods funded through excessive foreign borrowing that got us here in the first place. And over-consumption of foreign (especially third-world) goods will produce more greenhouse gas emissions -- because those developing-country factories and the power plants that keep them running are much less climate friendly than ours.
Perhaps most disturbingly, U.S. and European climate change devotees continue to see salvation in the UN-sponsored Kyoto reform blueprint. The U.S. Senate wisely refused to even consider the 1997 treaty precisely because it requires no emissions cuts from China and other major third-world countries. But these “developing” nations have recently passed the developed countries as the biggest engines of global
warming.
China’s emissions performance is in a league of its own. The People’s Republic has just exceeded America as the world’s larger emitter in absolute terms, and according to some estimates, is currently producing 14 percent more greenhouse gases than the United States. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Energy projects that, from 2005 to 2030, China will generate fully 47 percent of the projected global increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and the third world as a whole will produce more than 86 percent. The projected U.S. contribution? Just 6 percent. Letting