Empire of Carbon; and What?

I have seen the future, and it won't work.

No. The above line isn't plagiarized from Paul Krugman's article opener in the Empire of Carbon. It is the same line, but the meaning it carries in my post is very much different from Krugman's.

China is not a clean country. Every city you visit, you are almost always greeted with a foggy atmosphere, and you'd better clean your shoes everyday, because of the omnipresent dirt from all those construction sites. When I first came to Shanghai I was surprised to find the air conditions no better than that of Nanjing; isn't Shanghai closer to the sea and enjoys the natural sweep of the seaborne wind everyday? Nanjing, in comparison, is surrounded by hills and therefore is a natural trap for dirty air. 'But Shanghai's got many more cars.' My colleagues told me.

However, as Krugman has shrewly pointed out, the Chinese have their fair excuses for the pollution (a demerit good) they produce: that the development of the now developed countries was not put under such environmental-friendly restraints. Meanwhile, China's per-capita emission is still below that of the US. So after all, it is difficult to talk China down with moral rhetorics. And what can we do? It is very unlikely that China will do away with the problem of pollution all by herself--not nearly fast enough to satisfy everyone--because usually we do not expect the problem of negative externality to go away all by itself anyway.

This is where I started to get disappointed with Krugman. Much as he has been offering the correct insights into various economic matters, on this one his ideas are falling short:

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

What confrontation are we trying to build here? Maybe it's a matter of wording, but are we trying to say that we should 'beat China until she complies'? First of all, you don't beat a country into compliance--the US has learnt the lesson the hard way (or maybe it's not enough?). Secondly, you don't beat a country who has a fair excuse for what she does--this is all evil. Considering the target country is China, you cannot actually hope that she will remain docile while being beaten up; China has her claws, and many people out there are much more willing to believe this than I do. For goodness' sake, forget about confrontation. It's such an old word from the Cold War vocabulary.

The most desirable solution for China is that the international community gives her money enough to transform all production lines into cleaner ones. Yet will the indignant international community willing make this kind offer? I guess not.

So it all comes down to eclecticism. Investing more money into China's clean production will be a welcome gesture. China is already on her way to cleaner energy, but still not fast enough to cope with the problem of global warming and such. What the world can do is to invest in order to speed the process up. Do not face China with a cold look and threaten compliance. Help her with this good deed.

But confrontation might be such an easy word that everyone will pick it up sooner or later. And the future, perhaps, will no work...