Copenhagen: Much Ado About CO2

Copenhagen: Much Ado About CO2
By Don Blankenship, Chairman and CEO, Massey Energy Co. - 12/17/09 04:10 PM ET
Unless you believe in Santa Claus and sugar plum fairies, the global climate talks in Copenhagen this Christmas season are a colossal waste of time. Global warming is a hoax, perpetrated by a cult that at best has willfully ignored the fact that temperatures have not risen over the last decade and that at worst has simply lied about the facts. We now know for sure that global warming alarmists destroyed climate data that failed to support their hoax.

Despite these facts, planet-saving rhetoric continues among the 192 negotiators in Copenhagen seeking an international treaty to combat global warming by imposing mandatory greenhouse-gas emission limits. When President Obama arrives on December 18, he will pledge to slash U.S. emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. However, no amount of holiday cheer or billions of dollars for green technology will convince rapidly developing nations to accept a hard limit on the amount of carbon they emit. Watch what they do, not what they say. China, India and other developing countries will not choke their astounding economic growth and keep their people in poverty just to placate the “liars” of man-made global warming.


Nor should developing countries retreat on growth. “To get rich is glorious,” exhorted Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, and that mantra is now embraced around the world. Growth is the answer, not the problem despite complaints from radical environmentalists. Economic growth delivers huge benefits, including better health, running water, more food and improved housing. Electricity alone provides a jolt of prosperity in the Third World, where 79 percent of the people in the 50 poorest nations have no access to power.

However, with growth comes responsibility. Negotiators in Copenhagen are focused on the wrong problem. Economic competitors of Europe and the United States must adopt the same regulations that have produced a safer workplace for our employees and a cleaner environment for our communities and our children. For too long, developed countries have lost manufacturing jobs to developing nations with woeful environmental and safety records that endanger the health and welfare of their people, especially children. Fair trade is impossible under the existing ground rules.

In Copenhagen, too much effort is being wasted on mandatory emission limits that will damage the U.S. and European economies without producing any global environmental benefits. Too little thought is given to the reality that the carbon emission reductions envisioned in Copenhagen will export millions of jobs from the United States and Western Europe to developing nations. The biggest winners from an international treaty would be greedy multinational corporations that respond to increased regulation by closing factories in America and Europe and moving jobs to developing nations.

We must level the playing field by exporting the basic work-safety and environmental regulations that these jobs require in the developing world. Clean air regulations are one example. In the 1970s, the U.S. adopted clean air rules that required industrial America to control emissions from dangerous chemicals. The results are impressive. From 1980-2008, air pollution from ozone dropped 25 percent, particulates by 68 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 46 percent, carbon monoxide by 79 percent and lead by 92 percent, according the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. France, Germany, Great Britain and other European nations have achieved similar results. Conversely, in China, air pollution causes 300,000 premature deaths a year.

Now it’s time for fast-developing nations to play by the rules and do what’s right and fair. These economic miracles depend too much on inadequate environmental and safety standards to lower their manufacturing costs. Workplace deaths in China barely dipped below 100,000 in 2008. In November, a single mining accident killed 104 workers, another disaster in 2007 left more than 200 miners dead.

China is by no means the only fast-developing country with safety problems. According to a 2005 study by the U.N.’s International Labor Organization, the U.S. and Western Europe accounted for five percent of workplace fatalities. Almost 75 percent of the world’s 351,000 workplace deaths, including 22,000 children, were in developing countries such as China, India, other Asian nations and sub-Saharan African countries.

A 2008 U.N. study noted that the progress made by the world’s most industrialized nations in reducing occupational accidents and diseases had not yet been replicated in rapidly developing nations that lacked both effective work-safety systems and adequate enforcement. Improved safety demands vigilance, yet developing countries have just one labor inspector per 40,000 workers, according to a November 2009 U.N. report.

These statistics are important as negotiators devise global strategy in Copenhagen. International leaders should focus less on the superstition of man-made global warming and more on the real issues that human beings face today and every day.