The New York Review of Books ran a review June 12 of two books on climate change. It contains the following assessment of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.

Not having read up on the Stern Review, the work of Lord Stern of Brentford for the U.K. government, I don’t know if this description is perfectly accurate, but it is interesting, at least.

The practical consequence of the Stern policy would be to slow down the economic growth of China now in order to reduce damage from climate change a hundred years later. Several generations of Chinese citizens would be impoverished to make their descendants only slightly richer. According to Nordhaus, the slowing-down of growth would in the end be far more costly to China than the climatic damage. About the much-discussed possibility of catastrophic effects before the end of the century from rising sea levels, he says only that “climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for serious damages in the long run.” The Chinese government firmly rejects the Stern philosophy, while the British government enthusiastically embraces it. The Stern Review, according to Nordhaus, “takes the lofty vantage point of the world social planner, perhaps stoking the dying embers of the British Empire.”

Read the full review if you have a chance. It takes on several interesting questions among the two books. It also throws in this insight:

This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming

If a product is consumed in one country, and it is manufactured in another, which country is responsible for the carbon emissions from manufacture? And if one country outsources manufacturing to a country with more lax environmental regulation, who’s responsible for the extra carbon? These will be part of the discussion in Bali when representatives of the world’s countries gather next month to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2006, the idea that outsourcing industry meant outsourcing pollution was already well developed. A think tank report at the time suggested that “when trade between China and its partners exerts an environmental impact, the responsibility should be borne by all parties, including manufacturers, traders and consumers in the product chain,” according to the China Daily.

In The Wall Street Journal, Jane Spencer reports that this concept is back, and may play a role in Bali.

Past accords like Kyoto have looked at emissions on a country-by-country basis, requiring participating nations to reduce greenhouse gases released within their borders. In other words, the manufacturing nation pays for the pollution. But in a twist that could put more pressure on industrialized nations like the U.S., academics, environmentalists and some policy makers argue the next global climate treaty should take into account a nation’s emissions “consumption.” They argue the emissions are embedded in goods that move around the world through trade — so if the U.S. imports iPods from China, Americans should share some responsibility for the pollution produced in making them.

“As China’s emissions rise, everyone is pointing the finger of blame at China,” says Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank and environmental-advocacy organization based in London. “The real responsibility for rising emissions should lie with the final consumers in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.”

The article notes that some in the U.S. dispute this idea, but I find it pretty persuasive. If U.S. or other consumers didn’t buy products, they wouldn’t be made. The essential cause of emissions is the consumer. It doesn’t make sense to blame the venue of the proximate cause: coal burning in China.

This shouldn’t let China off the hook, though. China’s manufacturing is indispensible in the world economy, but we could do without the inefficient energy practices. The rub is that, without proper government intervention and assistance, more efficient practices could make products more expensive in the short term.

In the United States, the government has used a variety of means to encourage efficiency. Once efficient practices are mandated, manufacture actually gets cheaper: Factories buy less energy. But the innovation costs money at first. That’s why governments develop rebate programs to offset higher consumer prices or other incentives to offset higher costs of manufacture.

What this question raises, in my view, is whether it’s the exclusive responsibility of the Chinese government to back efficiency in China. If foreigners consume the products, shouldn’t they pay to reform the industries? Imagine China charged a carbon tax on all products and put the money into efficiency programs. Would the WTO allow China to charge a carbon export tax? Maybe Bali will help solve all this.

It’s been a while; to any loyal readers, my apologies. Since Monday evening I’ve been in Japan traveling, the first time I’ve left China after moving there last July. Writing now on the train between a visit in southern Kyushu on my way to Hiroshima, I’ll save you my personal reflections. I did see something of interest, however, in today’s Japan Times. The paper carried a Kyodo story on a U.S. professor’s advice to Japan.

In brief, the story reports that Kent Calder, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., urges that Japan be more “proactive” in its post-Bush relations with the United States. He also said that an Obama presidency may be more conducive to changes in Japan policy from the U.S. side than a Hillary Clinton or McCain administration.

The article leads with Calder’s comments on a concept called “Japan passing,” meaning essentially U.S. policy discussions going on without much discussion of this country. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, for example, China and Iraq are among the most talked-about countries in Clinton’s foreign policy, whereas Japan plays a small role. (Perhaps I will have time to compare that work with Obama and McCain.) The story may be using Calder’s statements to imply a general apathy in U.S. policy circles toward Japan, which I think isn’t true. Without knowing more about Calder’s work and statements, I can’t say what he thinks, but I do believe that economic and East Asian security concerns would prevent any U.S. government from ignoring Japan.

Calder said energy efficiency and environmental technology are strengths for Japan and might serve as a good way to increase its international influence. “Japan is the only major nation of the major energy producers whose consumption in the last three years or so has gone down,” Calder said.

Anecdotally, I see positive and negative forces at work in Japan on energy efficiency over the last few days. Mass transit is of course a strength here, and over two days in an area of Kyushu with fewer train options, I was glad to see light-engine automobiles either at parity with or outnumbering larger engines. Meanwhile the lack of good insulation in many regular Japanese residential and public buildings represents a huge opportunity for retrofitting to prevent energy waste as heating or cooling is lost through under-insulated walls. (As I write this, I am passing the most industrial and pollution-spewing vista I have encountered in Japan, off the shinkansen tracks near Tokuyama Station.)

I have taken an unanticipated break on this site because of an uptick in my paid workload: Sinobyte, my blog on Chinese technology and society for the CNET Blog Network, is now in its third month. I have also had work to do on some new consulting before what, barring any unforeseen changes, will be my return to the United States this fall for more academic work on East Asia. I am sure I will have more to say after my stay in Hiroshima, and most likely more to come after my return late this month to Beijing.

My former employer, CampusProgress.org at the Center for American Progress, has published a lengthy piece by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (a senior fellow at CAP) on U.S.-China environmental responsibility.

His central argument is that a leadership vacuum in both countries is a challenge to improving the environment. In the United States, he argues, the federal government lacks vision while many states are making progress on their own. In China, on the other hand, he points out that the central government is working hard on these issues but the challenge comes in spreading compliance to the provinces. The piece is full of good links, but much of the information will not be news to Transpacifica readers.

I’m taking advantage of Campus Progress’s generous republishing policy to include the full text here. The article was originally posted here.

The Greenhouse Heavyweights
Both the United States and China need climate change leadership.

By Tom Daschle
November 30, 2007

The United States and the People’s Republic of China are two of the 21^st Century’s leading superpowers. China’s economic development continues to dramatically outpace other countries. During the first half of this year, China’s GDP reached 11.5%, putting China on track for its 5^th consecutive year of double-digit growth. For its part, America remains the world’s leading engine of innovation, using our free market of ideas and capital to continue forging new solutions in science, medicine, and technology.

Regrettably, however, the United States and China have now ascended to world leadership in another much more threatening way: greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency has estimated that China will become the world leader in emissions by the end of the year. The Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency has reported that China is already there. Not to be outdone, the United States remains the world’s largest emitter on a per-capita basis. For every person in the United States, there are 6 tons of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. The United States and Chinese governments must not ignore these facts, but should instead embrace them as a catalyst for change. Indeed, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) recent 17th National Congress and the upcoming presidential elections in the United States provide a historic opportunity for our two countries to begin a new chapter of global leadership in the fight against climate change.

(more…)

Noted without comment.

A large travel agency is planning a big promotion overseas to get foreign sports teams to stay in Japan before going on to Beijing for the start of next year’s Olympic games. They are touting the facilities, the lack of pollution, the variety of food, the public safety, and the ease of access to Beijng.

The agency is serious–and they report the British swimming team has already decided to stay in Japan first!

Via Ampontan.

From my friend and TreeHugger Alex Pasternack comes an introduction to so-called ecotourism businesses in China, some of which are far from sustainable.

On a trip to the south of Yunnan province last year, in the sub-tropical Xishuangbanna region near Myanmar, friends and I eagerly undertook a trek only to discover that the path had become a large dusty road. Here we competed for space with large machinery preparing to pave the way, apparently, to eventually accommodate tourist buses. Our hopes of discovering wild China had been dashed by thousands of similar hopes. It was a quick lesson in the state of tourism in China, and it was a powerful one.

Read the entire post with a battery of good links at TreeHugger.

Plus, here’s a quick introduction to the principles of ecotourism, if you’re not familiar with the term:

According to the Quebec Declaration on Ecotourism, ecotourism
“embraces the principles of sustainable tourism… and the following principles which distinguish it from the wider concept of sustainable tourism:

• Contributes actively to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage,
  
• Includes local and indigenous communities in its planning, development and operation, contributing to their well-being,
• Interprets the natural and cultural heritage of the destination to visitor,
• Lends itself better to independent travellers, as well as to organized tours
  for small size groups”.

After the recent In These Times piece on Guiyu, a center for the recovery of valuable substances in old electronics, comes an Associated Press report that does some more digging on the noxious conditions for workers there. The article, by Christopher Bodeen, includes some good sourcing and a short mention of reporting conditions for some visitors:

Those who control the business in Guiyu are hostile to outside scrutiny. Reporters visiting the area with a Greenpeace volunteer were trailed by tough-looking youths who notified local police, leading to a six-hour detention for questioning.

Government departments from the provincial to township levels refused to answer questions. The central government’s Environmental Protection Agency did not reply to faxed questions.

The article also reminds us that China produces its own e-waste—some 1 million tons a year, according to Greenpeace China. It also quotes a Qingdao businessman who says he is not breaking even with a business that recycles electronics safely, and it points out that many people in Shanghai prefer “guerrilla recyclers” who offer good prices, despite the city’s opening of a dedicated e-waste recycling center. Anecdotal evidence from this central Beijing hutong suggests the same type of recycling is common here.

(If the detained reporter story sounds a bit familiar, that’s because it’s not an isolated incident. In one high-profile case, New York Times reporter David Barboza publicly told the story of being detained by a factory staff. And in his case, even the police were not able to arrange for his immediate release.)

h/t to my mom for forwarding the story.

Nate at Carrotrope introduces the 100-mile wardrobe ideal: If green-minded foodies can eat only food products from within 100 miles of their dinner table, why can’t green fasionistas wear locally-grown (organic) fiber?

This seems like a nice idea. Wearing local clothes, as with eating local food, radically reduces shipping-related emissions. As much as you may like Egyptian cotton, unless you’re in North Africa, the stuff carries a serious carbon footprint. But local textiles are going to get complicated if they get popular. Where Nate and I grew up, for instance, there is little or no fiber grown within 100 miles, unless you are especially good with yucca or grass weaving. Or we Coloradans would have to be forgiven for wearing leather: no cotton was grown in the state last year, but there were 2.7 million head of cattle in January. Now that doesn’t mean it’s ideal or ecological for us to ship in all our clothes from thousands of miles a way, but just like a 100-mile food radius, this works better in bountiful agricultural zones—say, California.

If we were to imagine widespread adoption of the locally-grown clothing concept, there would need to be some changes in the global economy. For one thing, subsidies and/or consumer choice would have to make it cost-effective to pay locals to work in textile factories. Textile industries that are key to the employment of large numbers of people in a variety of Asian countries would need to be replaced by other business.

Looking at ways to make clothing more environmentally friendly is a valuable pursuit. Since we can pretty much guarantee no huge number of U.S. consumers is going to jump on the train right away, this effort will likely help raise awareness and serve as a model that could pressure other clothing manufacturers to reduce shipping-based emissions. All the same, if this is too successful, it could have vexing (and fascinating) global repercussions.

James Fallows notes, but does not really respond to, a criticism of his persistent posts on bad air quality days in China. A reader recounts the thoughts of a Chinese friend, who “pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they’re thinking of China (if at all).” Where are the stories about Beijing’s efforts to replace coal heat with electric installations?

Let me start by pointing out what Fallows didn’t bring up: It’s simply not an accurate representation of “Western” news coverage to say they only focus on the environment. Thousands of stories come up in Google News searches on China and human rights, or China and Darfur. The U.S. press is preoccupied much of the time with a possible economic and military threat from China. The way I see it, at least the English-language news world focuses on several major story-lines with China, and the environment is one. It may be more prominent because the environment (thankfully) is a major story overall, and China plays an important role in the global environment.

That said, it is not unreasonable to criticize a large number of North American and European press reports for a failure to put China’s present environmental problems in perspective, especially when it comes to air quality in the cities. I happened to have a brief conversation yesterday with a man who was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the late ’60s. He remembered burning coal for heat—the stoves glowing red in some cases because of the high burning temperature of coal. And he remembered façades blackened from centuries of coal smoke.

In Beijing, I told him, some neighborhoods have seen their streets dug up repeatedly over the last weeks in preparation for heating season as the city installed brand new electric heating systems to replace coal-powered radiators. This year, the hutong apartment I live in is heated by electricity for the first time (aside from space-heaters), and coal is no longer the primary source of heat here. Before the systems turned on this week, some neighbors were burning coal to keep warm on cold nights. No more.

The new heaters have timers. Mine is programmed to come on at 10 p.m. and stay on until 6 a.m. My landlord tells me we’re doing this because electricity is cheaper at night. But the key here is that I can turn mine off when I leave town. I can also turn it off if I’m warm enough under a good blanket and don’t need the leftover heat in the morning. (Now to better seal my windows before the deep freeze…)

The English-language press is not devoid of stories recognizing the efforts by Chinese authorities to improve the environment. It’s also not terribly rare to read an article that notes London’s blackened history. People in the United States need only to visit steel country and take a good look at the University of Pittsburgh’s iconic tower to see some old U.S. industrial gunk. (They might have cleaned it up, but you could see it when I was there for a wedding a few years ago.)

When Chinese state media stories argue that developed countries who have already gotten rich at a cost to the environment should be responsible for tightening their belts more than those still developing, it’s hard to argue. But just try to get that sort of thinking through the U.S. Congress, and notice how far the Kyoto Protocol got with that ethic partially enshrined.

A sense of responsibility for past emissions needs to accompany pressures on emerging emitters. Richer countries with cleaner environments should work with poorer countries in the process of development to slow environmental degradation. The air in Beijing is indeed quite striking when you come from the United States—especially for me, from a background in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. But as the same Rhodes Scholar told me when I mentioned that I balked at jogging in Beijing air, “get over it.” Whether or not it’s the only focus of the “Western” press, and even though I don’t believe Fallows intends to be demeaning or contribute to a paternalistic narrative, putting across the message that “holy moly these people have dirty cities” does not create the understanding we’ll need to put together real solutions in the future. And dirty or not, we all keep going through life here.

Waste from scuttled electronics is full of toxic chemicals, but it’s also full of valuable metals and other materials. That turns e-waste into ore, something something from which value can be extracted. Terry J. Allen at In These Times reports that up to 80 percent of e-waste from the United States goes to China. And what happens when it gets there isn’t pretty.

Most of the junk ends up in the small port city of Guiyu, a one-industry town four hours from Hong Kong that reeks of acid fumes and burning plastic. Its narrow streets are lined with 5,500 small-scale scavenger enterprises euphemistically called “recyclers.” They employ 80 percent of the town’s families—more than 30,000 people—who recover copper, gold and other valuable materials from 15 million tons of e-waste.

Unmasked and ungloved, Guiyu’s workers dip motherboards into acid baths, shred and grind plastic casings from monitors, and grill components over open coal fires. They expose themselves to brain-damaging, lung-burning, carcinogenic, birth-defect- inducing toxins such as lead, mercury, cadmium and bromated flame retardants (the subject of last month’s column), as well as to dioxin at levels up to 56 times World Health Organization standards. Some 82 percent of children under 6 around Guiyu have lead poisoning.

Allen writes that dumping toxic waste in developing countries is illegal under international law, but the whole process is labeled as “recycling,” leaving it largely unmonitored.