The Energy Imperative

U.S. News reports on a new database of carbon emitters.  This paragraph gets buried at the end of the piece:

Strikingly, three Chinese power companies, South Africa’s giant Eskom, and India’s NTPC all generate more CO2 emissions than any single U.S. firm—underscoring the shared challenge posed by global climate change. The largest, Huaneng Power International of China, has emissions 68 percent higher than American Electric Power’s.

What this shows, once again, is that any effort to ration America’s energy usage through emissions limits is simply going to kneecap the U.S. economy while foreign competitors speed up the economic ramp.  Meanwhile, anyone who takes this as reason to try to limit the energy usage of developing countries should look over Megan McArdle’s recent post on the need for more energy in place like Vietnam:

Being in Vietnam makes visible the conflict that we’re facing over global warming. Ordinary lifestyles here are very low-energy. … I’ve flown into two cities at night now, and both times, the surprising fact is how dim they look from the sky.

But making their lives more energy intensive means burning more fossil fuels. Particularly in the early stages of development, it means burning nasty, polluting, carbon-emitting anthracite coal, which Vietnam not only uses for its own electricity, but increasingly exports to China.

… I saw a farmer today peddling a cow to market in a trailer attached to his bicycle. This engendered considerable confusion–on my family’s farms, the principle has always been that the animals expend energy to move you around, not vice versa. But it also speaks volumes as to just how much more energy the Vietnamese people could stand to consume.

And if we want to get these people out of their grinding, we’re going to have to let them.