From CEL:
Here’s something from the “I hope they didn’t spend too much money on that study” department: “West blamed for rapid increase in China’s CO2“. The Norwegian’s are set to drop this bombshell old chestnut in a soon to be released report according to an article in the Guardian.
When you have structured an economy on an export model, it seems rather axiomatic that you are going to be making stuff in your country that people in other countries will be consuming. In this scenario, who bears the “blame” for this fact?
This is not the 19th century and the commodity at issue is not opium. China is not a victim now. It has chosen a development model that encourages manufacture for export. When making that stuff generates pollutants, it would certainly be fair to charge the ultimate consumers of those products for the pollution caused (or preferably, for installing the production controls necessary to reduce that pollution to levels that do not significantly harm the environment).
Gotta agree with Charlie on that.
At the same time, I can't help but think about the big picture, the global trading system. Let's look back maybe ten or fifteen years ago at China trade to the US and EU. Imagine what would have happened if suddenly all environmental laws were strictly enforced. Where would China's export sector be today? In the aggregate, maybe not as big a change as you might think (most FDI did not come to China because of lax environmental controls), but it is safe to say that significant FDI in some industries would have been diverted to other countries.
Those other countries, given the hypothetical laid out above, would probably have lax environmental controls. If a company really wants to set up somewhere with a poor legal system, it can probably find a home; some countries will advertise this to attract FDI, while others will lose out. This is the classic lowest common denominator problem, which we usually discuss in the context of labor standards, the environment, and sometimes taxes. China has a lot more going for it as a manufacturing destination than being cheap (e.g. its enormous market), and of course it isn't all that cheap anymore, so the classic discussion doesn't work as well as it used to.
Nonetheless, aren't we still dealing with very large cross-border problems that beg for multilateral solutions? Charlie points to the Kyoto Protocol. I don't know enough about that specific mechanism to comment, but any system that can get us away from petty arguments about who is to "blame" (between producers and consumers) sounds like a good idea to me.