President Bush is struggling to find an acceptable compromise position on global warming. For years, he has said that the time wasn’t right to act on global warming. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol, dismissed setting benchmarks for carbon dioxide emissions, and repeatedly claimed that the issue needed further study. Lately, he’s been trying to moderate that stance somewhat, due to pressures from either Tony Blair, the Supreme Court, the new Democratic Congress, or some combination thereof. So, while he continues to reject the Kyoto Protocol, and has dismissed outright the recent ambitious German proposal, he has started to show some signs of progress. He has taken preliminary steps towards increasing regulations on automobile manufacturers, and just today he has proposed a new round of international talks, which must include China and India. The stipulation that China and India be included is important for two reasons. First, it addresses the common conservative complaint with the Kyoto Protocol, that it failed to hold those two polluters to the same standard that it holds the United States, thereby creating a competitive imbalance. Second, it reduces the probability that these talks will be successful to almost nothing.
China and India have long held that it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard as Europe and the United States. After all, they are still incredibly poor countries, measured per capita, who are struggling to modernize and industrialize any way they possibly can. They claim that they cannot afford to even potentially stifle new industries by holding them to strict environmental restrictions. Furthermore, they note that the United States and the European powers had no such restrictions when we were developing economically back in the eighteen hundreds; in fact, we all notoriously stripped our countries of countless environmental resources in our quest for wealth. China and India claim that it is completely unfair to hold them to that standard. The counter argument is that we didn’t know any better at the time, whereas the newly developing states do. Furthermore, American and European workers are already at a competitive disadvantage to Chinese and Indian workers when it comes to the drastic wage differentials; forcing us to conform to significantly more restrictive environmental policies will only exacerbate the problem.
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