A large number of people in foreign, formerly marginal economies have arrived or are close to arriving at what used to be an exclusively American destination: middle class lifestyle. Thomas Friedman warns in Hot, Flat, and Crowded that this trend will disastrously increase demand for fuel and energy while the world should instead be cooperating to reduce fuel consumption.
U.S. government efforts to reduce demand for fossil fuels, though, could threaten the American middle class with higher fuel expenses.
Friedman wrote in 2008 that countries like China and India will be very reluctant to adopt caps on CO2 emissions, regardless of pressure from the U.S. He also wrote that any effort to significantly effect reductions in fossil fuel consumption would involve politically unpopular measures. Since I’ve been reading his book in summer 2009, the G-8 meeting went by with no international agreement on carbon emissions caps, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (cap and trade bill) stalled before the Congressional August recess, and reports like these have made the news –
From the July 16 Wall Street Journal’s summary of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s comments to Chinese energy officials:
While noting that developed Western nations contributed most of the carbon dioxide already trapped in the atmosphere, Mr. Chu said China could add more in the next few decades than all the U.S. emitted since the Industrial Revolution.
And from the July 20 Carbon Offset Daily’s coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meetings with Indian Prime Minister Singh:
India stood firm Sunday against Western demands to accept binding limits on carbon emissions even as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed optimism about an eventual climate change deal to India’s benefit.
More recently, an August 11 Wall Street Journal editorial focuses on the protectionist conflict cap-and-trade energy taxes create for U.S. leaders trying to preserve American manufacturing jobs:
…at least 10 Senate Democrats…sent Mr. Obama a letter demanding that any bill taxing U.S. CO2 emissions must include a carbon tariff “to ensure that manufacturers do not bear the brunt of our climate change policy….We must not engage in a self-defeating effort that displaces greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them and displaces U.S. jobs rather than bolstering them,” wrote the Senators.