The Western economies have done a fantastic job of reducing carbon. They have been so effective that the low hanging fruit is pretty much gone. For example, while the United States is still a leading carbon emitter, it is also a leading, fully modernized economy with a high standard of living created in no small part by inexpensive energy. While the “gross” carbon figure might be large, the “net” carbon that can be reduced without reducing a modern quality of life or economic growth is not so large. Squeezing the remaining carbon out of our society becomes increasingly expensive and disruptive. All against the backdrop of what has been a fossil fuel revolution through the fracking process.
The major developing economies, most specifically China and India, are already outstripping the current carbon contribution from the West yet remain far behind the West in development. These nations, while giving lip service to voluntary carbon reduction goals that have been hailed as “breakthroughs” on the environmental left, have also provided statements that indicate they are not going to let such goals get in the way of their economic expansion. In fact, under COP21 they are allowed to continue their rapid carbon expansion for years to come before the promised reductions.
For variety of reasons the current view out of the UN, EU and the Obama Administration tends to be that carbon reduction efforts and any associated pain must be felt at the expense of the developed West (whether or not such efforts are practical, functionally possible or for that matter actually necessary). The West must set an example, and the concerns of the citizens in the West are not necessarily more significant to their leaders than those of others.
Some of this comes from the globalist/progressive viewpoint of humanitarian universalism as covered well in THIS post-BREXIT editorial by Damon Linker in The Week. As Linker wrote: And this means that the progressive future will even result in the end of politics itself–at least if politics is understood as encompassing more than the jostling of interest groups, bureaucratic administration, and the management of government benefits. Politics in that narrow sense will remain. But politics in Aristotle’s sense — this particular community in this place with this history and heritage, determining its own character for itself, deciding who is and who is not a citizen, who will rule, and in the name of which vision of the good life—that existential form of politics will cease to exist in the progressive future.
A cynic might also point out that this very specific, globalist approach to climate change additionally gives large bureaucratic governmental entities tremendous direct control over the private sector and the citizens, supports long-standing UN wealth distribution goals and invariably works against free market economics to create “winners” and wealth in a new and disruptive market while failure is backstopped by government subsidies.
There are other approaches, centered on future remediation if required, that are not being considered to any significant degree. This is especially notable because even if humans are the primary drivers of any warming (which is not as scientifically established as the proponents would suggest), there is plenty of debate even within that position over the actual degree of human influence and the actual extent to which warming would be a net negative vs a net positive. But, these approaches tend to lack the “ancillary” benefits found in the current approach.
