JEEM in USA Today

From USAToday (China now No. 1 CO2 offender):

China has overtaken the USA to become the world's No. 1 industrial source of carbon dioxide, the most important global-warming pollutant, according to a scientific study to be published today. ...

Unless China sharply cuts its emissions, "the situation is pretty bleak," says Richard Carson of the University of California, co-author of a study in today's Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. "There's a lot less time to do something than people previously thought."

Hat tip: GatE.

Comments

[Starving Economist]

Well, on the upside, the United States still leads in CO2 emissions *per capita*!

We're #1! We're #1! USA! USA!

PS* As an aside USA Today gets one of its facts wrong,
"Earlier in his administration, President Bush cited Chinese emissions as one reason to end U.S. participation in a treaty to curb global warming by developed nations. China is not a party to the treaty."

If they are referring to the Kyoto Protocol, then this statement is incorrect. China is indeed one of the parties that ratified Kyoto. However, as a developing county, they are not subject to any limits on their on GHG emissions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kyoto_Protocol_signatories

[joshua corning]

To bad recent natural weather changes has wiped out any signal for AGW.

Otherwise this might actually be important.

[Cervus]

Starving Economist:

So it basically cost China nothing to sign Kyoto. And the whole reason we didn't sign in the first place was that it placed no restrictions on developing countries. From Wikipedia:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.

I guess there's nothing we can do about climate change. No way to stop it. And why? Because of the gaping hole left in the Kyoto Protocol for developing countries. If this is everybody's problem, everybody needs to participate, no matter what the per capita emissions are.

[Bob Murphy]

John,

Do you endorse the term "pollutant" for CO2? I know some people are very picky about that, and I wondered what your take was.