On her visit to India two days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was publicly rebuffed when she raised the problem of global climate change. The Indian environment minister declared “we are simply not in the position to take legally binding emissions targets.”
No single country can address this problem on its own. Hence the international negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen in December to try to find a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. But the international effort has run into a seemingly insurmountable roadblock. On the one hand, the US Congress is clear: it will not impose quantitative limits on US emissions of greenhouse gases if China, India, and other developing countries don’t impose quantitative limits on theirs. Indeed, that is why the Senate was unwilling to ratify the Kyoto Protocol ten years ago. The logic seems completely reasonable: why should US firms bear the economic cost of cutting emissions if carbon-intensive activities would just migrate to countries without caps and global emissions continue their rapid rise? On the other hand, the leaders of India and China are just as clear: they are unalterably opposed to cutting emissions until after the United States and other rich countries go first. And why should they? The industrialized countries created the problem of global warming, in the process of getting rich; the poor countries should not be denied their turn at economic development. As the Indians point out, Americans emit more than ten times as much carbon dioxide per person.