How the carbon debt issue places an unjust burden on Global South

On the recommendation of Ed Conway, the author of the deservingly highly acclaimed book, The Material World, I purchased More and More and More: An all-consuming history of energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. At some level, it can be thought of as a book that provides the conceptual framework for The Material World, or as a sequel to, or an extension of, it.

 

Does the book provide an answer to the problem of de-carbonisation? No. Does that make the book useless? No. The negative responses to both questions attest to the book’s honesty. The book aims to show that the concept of energy transition is fundamentally flawed because there is no sequential replacement of one energy source with another. Energy sources are symbiotic, and there are also rebound effects. It is not as though coal replaced wood to be replaced by oil and gas, and then in the future by renewable energy. It has never worked that way, and it is unlikely to work that way. According to the author, “the United States burns twice as much wood as it did in the Sixties and Europe three times as much as it did at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

 

As the author writes, the belief that future innovations would bail us out is simply an exercise in procrastination. It prevents us from “basing climate policy on existing, available and cheap technologies, on the relevance of their use and the fair and efficient distribution of CO2 emissions.” We take up the fairness and innovation arguments for further examination.

 

The unfairness in the allocation of responsibility for controlling CO2 emissions is evident in the shifting of the burden of emission reductions from consumers to producers. It is unfair because the answer lies in energy demand rather than attacking the sources of energy supply: “The ‘transition’ of the rich countries of Western Europe away from coal is, in part, a statistical artefact linked to a convenient convention: the attribution of CO2 emissions to the countries producing the goods and not to the consumers.” On this basis, the UK consumes around 50 million tonnes of coal and not nine, and France 70, not six. The author also points out that Europe is a world leader in the manufacture of mining equipment, thanks to which the production of coal takes place.

 

Unfortunately, the West has doubled down on the unfairness with their pursuit of Carbon Border Adjustment Taxes, rendering climate policies an extension of their trade policies. This sentiment was expressed by America’s Robert Reinstein, who became the head of Group III in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1991. The IPCC is divided into three groups —Group III focuses on solutions, Group I on climatology and Group II on impacts. For good measure, he added that the European climate objectives were the means of undermining American industrial competitiveness. Touche.

 

Indeed, a fair and efficient distribution of CO2 emissions would mean that there is a serious consideration of economic de-growth as an option in advanced economies with high per capita income and high per capita emissions. Emissions dropped by a quarter during the Great Depression. In its last Annual Energy Outlook, the US Energy Information Administration assumed a baseline economic growth of 1.9 per cent per year through 2050.

 

Western scientists understood the trade-off between emissions reduction and economic growth and baulked at the idea of giving up on growth. In a report published in 1983, the US Environmental Protection Agency wrote that even the most radical solution would only postpone the date on which the +2 degree Celsius would be passed. It suggested that only a complete ban on coal and shale oil would give additional time of 25 years, from 2040 to 2065, but noted that it would be achieved only at the cost of economic dislocation. Similarly, in 1989, contemplating the scenario of a drastic increase in fuel prices to curtail emissions, the British Ministry of Agriculture warned that it would have catastrophic consequences for competitiveness.

 

Yet, developed nations now want developing countries with much lower per capita income and emissions to adopt those growth-gutting policies and measures with nary a thought for the financial and technological resources they would need and the consequences for economic growth and social stability when legitimate aspirations are sacrificed at the altar of emissions-reduction.

 

An interesting sidelight in the book is that Americans had identified that the Soviet Union (USSR) needed large-diameter steel tubes to modernise its oil industry as a binding constraint and sought an embargo on the export of steel pipes to the USSR. However, Germany, Austria and Italy exported 1.3 million tonnes of pipeline to the USSR between 1958 and 1962, leading “to the construction of the largest gas and oil pipeline network in the world.” Governments in developing countries facing sanctions today from the West for enabling Russian oil to flow to the world may do well to take note of this.

 

On innovation, the author provides good arguments as to why the belief in technological innovations may be misplaced. One reason is that the more we allegedly innovate, the more material we consume. A tyre in 2020 contains as many different materials as a car did a century ago. Also, a smartphone uses 60 of the 87 metals in the periodic table of elements, whereas a telephone in 1920 used 20 materials. Extracting or mining these and converting these into forms that go into our smart gadgets require more and not less energy, a fact that Ed Conway stressed repeatedly in his book.

 

Second, innovations that supposedly saved on material use have increased their usage by volume. Individual lightening led to an overall weight increase. Cardboard boxes weigh one-twentieth of a wooden crate, while a pallet can support up to fifty times its weight. As a result, pallet production rose seven times in the US between 1960 and 2000 and 40 million cubic metres of cardboard boxes at the beginning of the twenty-first century were produced. The latter is “double the amount of raw wood and far more than all the wood used by all modes of transportation in the United States a century earlier.” Another example is the development of the internet and digitalisation, which led to the decline in the consumption of printing paper, but the use of cardboard packaging exploded due to e-commerce. If the wood used in packaging were taken into account, it would be the most transported material in the world.

 

Ultimately, there are no easy answers. Unwilling and unable to grapple with complex challenges and make progress incrementally, the West is trying to brazen it out with corner solutions, ignoring trade-offs between climate goals and other sustainable development goals, including economic growth. Further, western countries resist the issue of recognition of carbon debt. In effect, they are defaulting on it. But, the creditor nations — developing countries — are asked to give up more carbon. This is a geopolitically unstable equilibrium. The book, More and More and More: An all-consuming history of energy, succeeds in making the readers reach this conclusion. Whether developed countries realise it is an altogether different matter.

 

The author is chief economic advisor to the Government of India. The views are personal