I consider a careful read of Nigel Lawson’s recent book: “An Appeal To Reason”. I am sure he does not have all his fact correct, I doubt any of us do. However, he makes several powerful points that are worthy of consideration. Let us say that the US and Europe all toe the line on carbon emissions. India and China have told the rest of the world to go take a hike. Perhaps it is correct for them to do so. Their populations are not well off economically, but that is a different argument. CO2 emissions are fungible. What will occur is that the industries that require lots of coal to be burned and so forth will simply leave the US and Europe and move to production in those countries. No net CO2 savings. CO2 emitted in China is all the same as CO2 from Great Britain in so far as global warming is concerned. It should also be noted that CO2 is not the worst of the greenhouse gases around. Burning natural gas is less CO2 intensive than burning coal. Alas, a substantial (perhaps as high as 20%) of methane is lost through leakage between the well head and the destination. Methane is 20X as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. [As an aside, this is one of the nasty facts you do not hear about when somebody builds a hydro facility. They flood an area that contains plants when they create the artificial lake behind the dam. The plants rot and produce methane. The time to break even is estimated by some people as being as long as 50 years in total greenhouse gas effect vs. burning coal. I do not have the data per se, so I will remain agnostic on the actual effect, but it does exist.] Also, while the US and Europe have pretty much eliminated CFCs per the Montreal convention, China still uses them. The global warming effect of CFCs is thousands of times larger than that of CO2. We are paying them to reduce the emissions, and they are doing so slowly, but they are still producing them.
Things are never so simple and neat when you have a number of agents all reacting to different utility functions and the thing that you are talking about is fungible.
