Kicking away ladders

As confirmed by colleagues who attended the event, it will surprise no one to hear the representatives of our current government acquitted themselves rather poorly at this year's UN Climate Change Conference (COP25). Despite officially planning to withdraw from the global climate accords, the Paris Agreement, U.S. negotiators nonetheless sought to shape the discussions around this agreement to their own advantage, trying to take without giving. They were, in short, freighted with an immense load of self-entitlement.

Reading an older climate change book recently, however, to get some context—that is, Christine Shearer's brief 2011 work Kivalina: A Climate Change Story—I at least had the cold comfort of learning that such behavior on our government's part is not new. The preceding generation of climate negotiators went through something similar in trying to hammer out the Kyoto Protocol. There again, the United States wanted to sacrifice nothing, but receive all.

In particular, the Bush administration's contention at the time was that the United States should not have to agree to any emissions reductions on its part which developing countries—China and India, e.g.—were not willing to meet or exceed as well. Indeed, by a forced logic, the United States refusing to reduce emissions came to be portrayed as a maneuver to eventually reduce emissions overall, because—so it was claimed— this would give us leverage in climate negotiations in compelling reductions from other states.

How so? What was it to them whether the U.S. reduced emissions or not? Are we saying we were dangling over them the threat of major flooding and other deadly climate disruptions if they didn't play ball? No matter—the logic didn't have to be explained or make sane or moral sense. Besides— it was, if nothing else, a better situation than the one we find ourselves in currently, since at least the Bush administration was acknowledging in this way the reality in some measure of climate science.

This Bush-era argument about compelling emissions reductions from other countries by refusing to make any of our own, however, did far-reaching damage in another quarter as well. As Christine Shearer charts in her book, it also soon gave courts an easy out when trying to rule on lawsuits brought against the EPA for climate-related damages.

Court after court, she shows us, could now rule the EPA's failure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (despite its broad authority to do so under statute), was a "political question" for which it could not be liable, and over which the courts had no power. The EPA's decision not to regulate emissions under Bush was now portrayed, not as a glaring failure to protect the public's health and other interests, as it is charged by the law to do, but rather as a deliberate negotiating strategy that the judicial branch could not second-guess.

The administration was deliberately not reducing emissions, the argument went, so that they could pressure other governments in the developing world to reduce emissions of their own. And who were the courts to say this was ultimately not in the public's best interest?

These particular legal controversies now of course are dead and buried. The Obama administration did in fact use more of the EPA's statutory authority to regulate emissions. And the Trump administration since then has rolled back these rules in turn, as one plank of a sweeping overhaul of environmental protection regulations. They have done so, moreover, with little to none of the Bush administration's specious argument that it was all in favor of eventually compelling China through international negotiations to cut back on its own addiction to carbon. It would be interesting, therefore, to see how the old "political question" doctrine might be litigated under the present regime.

The "blame China" argument, however—the "why should we do anything before China does" school of thought—is still alive and well; even among climate deniers. With the present generation of climate "skeptics," one will often hear a two-step argument that manages to defeat itself right from the starting-blocks. First: Climate change is barely a problem at all, it is said; and secondly—and at the same time—it is a problem, but it is mostly China's fault.

Donald Trump's famous contention that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese thus manages to combine these two wondrously incompatible thoughts together into one glorious agglomeration of illogic.

And so the Bush-era argument not only survives; it thrives. A Republican friend of mine recently tried this "isn't China the real problem?" tack on me. To this, Cambridge engineering professor David J.C. MacKay provided the best answer, back in 2009: "What about China, that naughty 'out of control' country?," he wrote. "[.... T]he fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. [...] Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries." (emphasis in original).

There is a great deal to condemn the Chinese government for in this world. Being a despotic authoritarian regime, for one. Confining more than a million people in concentration camps in the country's western provinces under a racist regime of indoctrination that could well turn into genocide, for another. But climate change is not one of them.

In trying to condemn China and India for emitting greenhouse gases, the United States is guilty of a double-think so glaring that the term "hypocrisy" seems too tame to describe it. We are, basically, doing what Shakespeare's Brutus accuses all ambitious people of doing, in one of his great soliloquies:

'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. 

In other words, we are deprecating the same dirty and climate-destroying means by which the United States itself climbed to global economic preeminence. Having powered our rise on fossil fuels, we now simultaneously want to withhold the same means of ascent to other countries, without making the slightest sacrifice in return. To borrow a phrase from economist Ha-Joon Chang, who got it in turn from the German "historical school" economist List, we are "kicking away the ladder." The ladder, that is, that we just used to hoist ourselves upward to great heights - Brutus' ladder.

It is of course true that to avoid catastrophic damages, all countries are going to have to find ways to reduce our emissions. It will never do, however, to try to reach this end by "looking to the clouds" and "scorning the base degrees by which we did ascend." We have to start by acknowledging our own country's far vaster and far longer-term contribution to the underlying problem of climate change—and therefore that responsibility, like charity, begins at home.