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By Root 1248 0

emissions because of their ties to the energy industry. But their skepticism about climate change also has a geographic rationale. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the 110th Congress represented districts with carbon emissions per capita that were 21 percent higher, on average, than those in districts represented by committee Democrats. Fifty-nine percent of Oklahoma’s carbon emissions from electricity generation come from coal-fired plants. So it should perhaps be unsurprising that Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

The poor are not enthusiastic about the prospect of an energy tax either. Americans in the top tenth of the income distribution emit 2.5 times as much carbon as people at the bottom. But families among the bottom tenth of the income pile spend more than a quarter of what they earn on energy—compared with only 3.6 percent for those at the top.

OPPOSITION TO EFFORTS to avert climate change is arrayed along similar lines around the world. Poor countries in the tropics stand to suffer the most from warming. In Brazil, agribusiness accounts for one quarter of the economy. Agriculture accounts for 21 percent of India’s GDP, about seventeen times its share of the United States economy. By 2080, global warming is expected to reduce agricultural productivity across the developing world by 15 percent to 26 percent. By contrast, farmers working the vineyards of Germany’s Mosel valley might welcome climate change: a 1°C increase in temperature could increase their annual revenue by 30 percent, boosting the ripeness of their grapes. A 3°C rise would more than double the value of their land.

The heat also disrupts industrial activity and even political stability in poorer countries. Studying the relationship between temperature fluctuations and economic performance since 1950, researchers found that a 1°C increase in temperature reduced economic growth in poor countries by 1.1 percentage points but had no discernible effect on richer nations. But though developing nations stand most to gain from slowing the earth’s warming, they are the most resistant to accepting any new costs to effect change. They aspire to the same energy-intensive development strategies that the developed world used to get rich and have settled on an environmental strategy that consists of reminding the industrial world that climate change to date is its fault, so it has a moral obligation to fix it.

Rich countries face the flip side of this quandary. By the end of the century, more than 85 percent of the world’s population will live in the developing world. When presented with the bill to avert climate change, voters in rich countries see a plan to save people who will be born far in the future and halfway around the world. Developed nations can’t even bring themselves to push for aid for people alive in poor countries today. Despite commitments to raise their foreign aid budgets to at least 0.7 percent of their GDP, only Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have met the target. The United States and Japan, the two largest economies in the world, provide 0.2 percent and 0.18 percent of their GDP in development aid. Germany contributes 0.35 percent. What chance is there that they will agree to provide much more to help poor foreigners who haven’t been born yet and won’t be born for a while?

As the United States Congress debated endlessly over legislation to cap carbon emissions in the summer of 2009, Representative Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy Committee, argued that “I’m concerned that we’re giving China a ticket to become the world’s greatest free rider, enjoying all of the benefits that developed countries enjoy without having to share any burden, and challenging American economic dominance in a way that hasn’t been done by anybody since before World War II.”

FOR ALL THE various opposing interests, I believe the main reason for our cavalier approach to climate change is