A brief line in here tipped me off to something fascinating that is gradually gaining ground:
Last week, the energy secretary, Steven Chu, said he favored tariffs on Chinese goods if China did not sign on to mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — underscoring how the “green economy” could be the next trade battleground.
The idea is to target tariffs specifically to carbon-intensive goods. To be honest, it’s difficult to know what to think about this. It is a bad-behavior / bad-behavior swap at a huge scale to try to build a more sustainable world, a mercantilist idealism. It’s a real doozy.
The prospect of raising economic friction with China is not pleasant by any means; it is possibly a very reckless move. On the other hand, it is unquestionably reckless not to take some action on global warming, and this move has a couple of other salutary features. For one, it accepts Western complicity in fueling China’s unsustainable rise; while tariffs are usually thought of as selfish and mercantilist measures, in this case they have the added benefit of exerting more normative force than rhetorical pressure would alone. The difficulty is this: presumably, carbon-intensive goods would include those that the United States would be inclined to protectionism over anyway, causing mixed signals. Textiles and cheap consumers goods should be labor intensive and relatively cheap to import and so be classified as carbon-light goods; manufactured products (cars, plastics, rubbers, and electrical machinery and power generation equipment, which account for the largest Chinese exports by volume by far) and also raw materials because of their transport cost (iron and steel) would presumably be more carbon-intensive. In other words, we would be blocking for moral reasons the very goods we would want to block for selfish protectionist reasons.
My inclination is to be tentatively and carefully in favor of the proposal, simply because something must be done to build a sustainable China. If someone out there can help me with the conundrum above, that would count further in its favor.
Filed under: Economics , China, protectionism, sustainability, tariffs
“..we would be blocking for moral reasons….”
This sort of makes it sound as if global warming is a matter of abstract morality rather than long-term planetary survival. Also, tariffs are not always and in all circumstances “bad behavior,” though in the current world economic downturn concerns about possible trade conflicts are, understandably, heightened.
Anyway, the proposal is interesting. I don’t think its legislative prospects would be that great, but that’s a somewhat uninformed guess.
p.s. the timestamp on the comment is not correct.
You don’t think global warming is a moral issue? I do. It’s something we owe to each other, and something we owe to the planet. If we could somehow insulate half of us from the effects of global warming, sustainability would remain important because of our moral duties to the other half of humanity; if we could somehow insulate all of us from those same effects (by venturing into space or whatever), it would remain important because we owe our planet better. Obviously, there is debate on the former issue and even more on the latter, but I think both are generally right. It isn’t an abstract morality—it’s a life-or-death, root-of-our-humanity moral issue.
Thanks for the comment, though; I thought about this for a while. I do need to be careful about what I describe as a moral issue.
[...] emissions limits has found its way into the omnibus energy bill that Obama has to sign. Previously, I argued that if there were some way to differentiate the protectionist signal from the environmental one, [...]