By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Jeffrey Ball has written an interesting essay on climate change, finance, and the
developing world. Ball argues, persuasively, that the most sensitive point upon
which pressure can be applied is financing for utilities and other
infrastructure projects in the developing world, which will produce most of the
greenhouse-gas emissions in the coming decades.
Nowhere is cutting carbon emissions
more crucial than in the world’s emerging and developing economies, where the
thirst for energy, and the output of carbon dioxide, is rising the fastest. New
power plants there will lock in the trajectory of global warming for decades to
come.
But here’s the big problem:
Fifty-two percent of new power generation financed in those countries from 2018
through 2020 is on track to be inconsistent with the global goal of keeping
Earth’s average temperature from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial
levels. That’s the threshold scientists have said is crucial to stave off
particularly disastrous effects from global warming.
The biggest foreign financiers of
these projects were in Japan, China and South Korea. But significant funds have
also been coming from banks, utilities and other companies in the countries
themselves.
. . . If the financing of these
climate-shaping projects doesn’t get smarter soon, then all that money from
corporations and governments claiming it as evidence of progress is likely to
end up doing all too little for the planet.
I don’t disagree with much in his analysis. But if this
argument were written more directly, it would be denounced as pure
“neo-colonialism.” Because what Ball is arguing for here is effectively attenuating
the decision-making powers of the governments of poor countries, taking real
power from their elected governments and local authorities and transferring it
to financial powers, the most powerful of which are in the developed world, in
effect imposing a partial capital embargo on the poor countries until they have
been financially starved into adopting the rich world’s climate agenda.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the wrong way
to go about it, but the antiseptic language disguises what ought to be plainly
admitted as an exercise of brute financial force upon the governments of poor
countries, including democratically elected governments that are working to
balance the competing interests of the people and groups to which they are
directly accountable.
The climate movement has never been able to deal directly
with the fact — or even to admit that it is a fact — that its agenda enjoys
widespread popular support almost nowhere, being rejected by all but a
vanishingly small handful of electorates when costs are included. That is true
of the United States, it is true of India, it is true of much of Europe, and it
is true of most of the rest of the world.
And in non-democratic countries, the mechanics of
accountability may work differently but the results must be in many cases the
same: Beijing isn’t going to hold a plebiscite on the question, but it is
unlikely that the Chinese Communist Party bosses are going to impose any real
economic pain on the Chinese people in order to keep a promise made to the
conventioneers in Paris and Glasgow.
Leaning on finance is one possible way around that. But we should not be under any illusions about what that means in practice: deploying the financial might of the rich world against the democratic preferences of the poor world.
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