Hotfootnote to the preceding

The United States is hardly the only candidate for criticism regarding its commitment to resisting global warming.

China is the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, trailing only the US - and those positions are now predicted to be reversed in just a few years due to China's aggressive economic expansion, which is generating ballooning demand for electricity. Some 70% of that energy is produced by coal-fired power plants, many of which lack adequate pollution controls.

As a result,

China is failing to make progress on improving and protecting the environment, according to a new Chinese government report[, said the BBC the end of January]. ...

The Chinese report, prepared by academics and government experts, ranked the country 100th out of 118 countries surveyed.

Some 30 indicators were used to measure the level of "ecological modernisation" including carbon dioxide emissions, sewage disposal rates and the safety of drinking water.

Despite that, and despite having officially acknowledged both the reality and the risks of global warming, just a week after that report was issued, the New York Times reported that China declared that

wealthier countries must take the lead in curbing greenhouse gas emissions and refused to say whether it would agree to any mandatory emissions limits that might hamper its booming economy.

Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said China was willing to contribute to an international effort to combat global warming but placed the primary responsibility on richer, developed nations that have been polluting for much longer.

Chinese officials say that their nation's per capita output of greenhouse gas emissions remains below that of the wealthy nations, but that is as bogus an argument as some of those coming out of Washington and other industrialized nation capitals. In some cases, comparing per capita outputs can be revealing, such as where local concentrations of pollutants are what's significant. But that's not true here; here, what nature cares about is the total output - not the relative size of the economy or population that produced it.

China's countryside is, by the government's own admission, heavily polluted. Its plans to address that have repeatedly fallen short of the avowed goals. Even now, it continues to describe global warming as "ultimately a development issue" and continues to resist agreements that might affect its industrial expansion.

But the fact is, developing nations such as China are in the best position to deploy alternative energy sources and enhanced pollution controls precisely because they are developing: There is no expense involved of uninstalling previously-existing infrastructure. Yet rather than call on the industrialized nations to provide technological assistance to enable developing nations to do that and despite its own acknowledgment of global warming, China digs in its heels, continues to plan for a new power plant every week, and plays a self-defeating game of "you first."

In that, let it be said, China is hardly alone. This is from Reuters from earlier this month:

The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Tuesday that wealthy countries were responsible for global warming and that they should stop telling Brazil what to do with the Amazon rain forest.

"The wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation, but they already deforested everything," Mr. da Silva said during the announcement of a public works project in Rio de Janeiro.

Da Silva said wealthy countries should switch from fossil fuels to fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.

Guess which nation is the world’s leading producer of ethanol. Go ahead, guess. I bet you'll be right.

Footnote: Even here, however, the US cannot escape criticism:

Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. "We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution," he said.

This despite the fact that the US generates roughly a quarter of the total of greenhouse gas emissions.

I keep wanting to be hopeful but more and more I'm inclined to agree with those scientists who are starting to say that it's already too late, we're already so screwed, and what we need to be doing is thinking of how we're going to adapt to the coming changes. That doesn't mean doing nothing, but it does mean the goal can no longer be preventing the disruptions but preventing the worst of them and learning how to deal with the rest.