It’s bad enough when European and American politicians desperate
to “do something” about global warming appear willing to sacrifice
economic growth in their own countries. Now they are ready forsake
the world’s poorest citizens, too.
For 15 years, developing countries like China and India have
refused to join the crusade against climate change because the
solution to global warming — reducing greenhouse gas emissions —
hurts their number one priority, economic growth. That is, poor
countries chose the fight against poverty over the fight against
climate change.
Until a few months ago, developed countries formally respected
developing nations’ “right to develop,” as it’s known in
diplomat-speak. The first major international treaty to address
global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, exempted developing countries
altogether from binding emissions reductions.
This arrangement worked as long as rich countries ignored their
promises to fix the climate. Developed countries first agreed to
undertake emissions reductions at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. They
haven’t, and global emissions have continued to rise. The Kyoto
Protocol has been another failure, which is why Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper says that it “divided the world into two
groups, those that would have no targets, and those that would meet
no targets.”
RECENTLY, HOWEVER, politicians in Europe and America have indicated
that they intend to get serious about climate change. Now that
costly emissions reductions are at hand, leaders in developed
countries have decided that they want to orchestrate a global
response to global warming, irrespective of the human consequences
— whether developing nations like it or not.
To force developing countries to reduce their carbon footprint,
politicians in developed countries have embraced a novel, if
sinister, solution: global warming tariffs. By taxing the carbon
footprint of imports, the United States and the European Union’s
member states would export emissions regulations to developing
countries.
Support for a carbon tariff is said to be strong among EU
bureaucrats in Brussels. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy has
promised to “defend the principle of a carbon compensation
mechanism (i.e., a carbon tariff) at the EU’s borders with regard
to countries that don’t put in place rules for reducing greenhouse
gas emissions.”
In the U.S., import duties are a part of the Lieberman-Warner
climate change bill now making its way through the Senate. The Bush
administration has given mixed signals. A month ago, U.S. Trade
Representative Susan Schwab told reporters that the administration
had “been dismayed at a variety of suggestions where we see climate
or the environment being used as an excuse to close markets.”
A week later, however, the U.S. Ambassador to the European
Union, C. Boyden Gray, gave European journalists a different
perspective. According to the Bureau of National Affairs,
Ambassador Gray said that the EU and America would “have no choice”
but to enact carbon tariffs if developing countries did not
voluntarily commit to emissions reductions.
Clearly, carbon tariff policies are gaining political traction
in rich countries. That should worry advocates for the world’s
poorest citizens, because free trade is the surest ticket out of
poverty.
By facilitating the unfettered flow of finance, goods and
services across national boundaries, trade liberalization allows
developing countries to use their comparative advantage —
abundant, inexpensive labor — to produce goods and services for
the global marketplace at competitive prices. According to the
World Bank, free trade policies enacted in the 1980s caused a shift
in manufacturing and service activities from rich to poor countries
that delivered more than 100 million people out of poverty during
the 1990s.
Carbon tariffs are designed to mitigate climate change, but they
would also mitigate wealth creation. Rich-country politicians need
to acknowledge the profound human toll of global warming
protectionism before they try to force developing countries into an
international scheme to fight climate change.
