The Earth is warming considerably because of the excessive release of several "Greenhouse Gases" into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. These gases mimic a greenhouse, letting light from the sun touch the Earth's surface, but then trapping the heat once the sunlight energy radiates off the Earth (this is illustrated in the picture above labeled "The Greenhouse Effect"). As a result, the gases tend to make the earth's atmosphere warmer. 

One of the most important greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide, responsible for the majority of human-induced warming. There are two means of increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. One way is to burn hydrocarbons (fossil fuels), such as coal, oil and natural gas. Burning these fuels causes a chemical reaction which creates carbon dioxide, and by releasing the carbon dioxide into the air we increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Each one of us contributes to the burning of fossil fuels each time we drive our cars, heat our homes with natural gas, use electricity produced in coal plants, eat food produced by using oil-powered machinery, and so on. Since such an enormous array products require the burning of fossil fuels to be produced, it is very difficult to quickly cut down on fossil fuel emissions without seriously damaging the economy.

Another way of increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is to cut down forests; trees naturally convert carbon dioxide into oxygen through the process of photosynthesis, so when humans cut down trees the carbon dioxide that would normally have gotten converted into oxygen remains in the atmosphere. It is estimated that approximately 80% of the increase in carbon dioxide over the past fifty years was due to fossil fuel combustion, while 20% was a result of deforestation.

Because we are constantly burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, humans are causing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to rise dramatically. In the years before the industrial revolution, the Earth’s concentration of carbon dioxide was 280 molecules of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air (this measurement is usually described as parts per million, or ppm). Since 1750, human combustion of fossil fuels and clearing of forests has increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from 280 ppm (in the year 1750) to 384 ppm today.  CO2 concentration will only get larger as humans continue emitting 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

In Chapter Four, I explained how several of the economies of Asia have, miraculously, entered the cycle of prosperity and started becoming rapidly wealthier. China's economy is growing by about 9% per year, meaning that its total wealth will double approximately every eight years; India is growing comparably fast, with its wealth doubling every ten years. I'd like to emphasize the enormity of this statement; China and India together represent approximately 40% of the world's population (about 2.5 billion people), meaning that their surge in wealth is fundamentally changing the entire planet.

As Chinese and Indian consumers become more wealthy, they're going to demand products which seriously contribute to global warming. For example, Chinese and Indian consumers will now be able to buy cars for the first time. In their 2008 study Two Billion Cars, exploring the future of the international auto industry, transportation experts Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon predict that rising incomes in China and India will result in a doubling of the total number of cars in the world, from one billion to two billion in just three decades. Since cars run on gasoline (or on electricity derived from burning coal), those extra billion cars will dramatically increase the carbon emissions of both China and India. Also consider that Chinese and Indian consumers will now be able to afford to eat meat. A gram of meat takes seven times more energy to produce compared to a gram of rice or grain, since over their lifetime cows consume around seven times their body weight in grain feed. The extra energy needed to produce this extra grain feed will be derived from coal and gasoline, so this increase in meat consumption will once again raise Chinese and Indian carbon emissions. Finally, China and India both need huge amounts of electricity to fuel their growing economies. Unfortunately, China and India happen to have some of the most enormous reserves of coal in the world, so most of this new electricity will come from coal power (as opposed to nuclear power plants or renewable energy). The process of building these coal-powered plants has already begun; China is currently building one coal power plant per week, and India has recently invested in the creation of several giga-watt (billion watt) coal-powered plants in the coming years. These facilities multiply tremendously both the electricity available to China and India's citizens and the carbon which these nations are emitting.

All of this adds up to gigantic increases in the carbon emissions for the world as a whole. It is expected that international annual carbon emissions will rise from 36 billion tons of CO2 per year to an astounding 60 billion tons in just 14 years! By 2050, total carbon emissions will exceed 87 billion tons. This enormous increase in annual carbon emissions will dramatically accelerate the rate at which the Earth is warming, bringing us closer to catastrophe at a faster pace. Because of these worsening conditions, by the year 2050 the Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will rise to an astounding 560 parts per million, approximately twice what is was before the Industrial Revolution.

 As the climate continues to warm to dangerously high levels, life on planet Earth will suffer greatly due to immense changes in environmental conditions.  We have already begun to witness the start of such transformation; in 2005, we witnessed a slew of abnormally powerful hurricanes pummel the Southern United States, including Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans. In 2008, we saw an unprecedented number of hurricanes form in the Atlantic Ocean (Atlantic hurricanes are more frequent than at any other time in the last 1000 years according to research by the scientific journal Nature). As mentioned earlier, scientists predict that the frequency of such extreme hurricanes is likely to increase with rising temperatures, as warmer waters tend to create more powerful wind gusts. Humanity is also currently watching the melting of the polar icecaps, an enormous environmental transformation which will leave hundreds of arctic species, including the polar bear, extinct. Since carbon dioxide mixes with water to form an acidic compound (carbonic acid), increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations are also causing the ocean to acidify; this has contributed to the mass death of several ocean species, including the coral making up the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. 

Perhaps the most deadly negative consequence of climate change will be the dramatic increase in droughts across the planet. In the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, they predicted that there is a 66% chance that Earth will see a rise in the total number of droughts. This is because when the air's temperature increases, it becomes able to "hold" larger amounts of water (since warm water vapor has a higher pressure). Since there will be more water in the air, there will be less water on the ground to sustain crops. In addition, plants lose large amounts of water from their stomata (tiny holes in their leaves) in a process known as transpiration; as air temperature increases water will tend to leak out of these holes more rapidly, and thus plants will need to absorb more water than normal to survive. Climate change has already contributed to the rapid desertification of China's Western region, and will probably cause the deaths of millions of trees across the equator (including large areas of the Amazon Rain Forest).

Moreover, millions of impoverished people depend on the annual partial melting of glaciers from large mountains located near them; they use the water runoff from these glaciers as their source of water for the entire year. But thanks to Global Warming, these glaciers are all but disappearing; soon there will be nothing left to supply these populations with water for their crops, leading to mass permanent drought.

As mentioned in chapter one, the citizens of extremely poor nations are heavily dependent on agriculture, with more than 85% of the population surviving by growing their own food. Since these populations have almost no savings (they can barely feed themselves much less save for a rainy day) these citizens' lives are often at the mercy of droughts; if the rains fail to come, these people often die of starvation. 

Severe droughts negatively affect extremely poor societies in three ways. First, droughts negatively affect health by forcing families to go without food, depriving them of the nutrients needed to fight off disease; since the nutrient deprived, starving workers will not be as productive as healthy workers, productivity within the extremely poor nation is weakened, causing the economy to suffer (as explained in chapter three, this terrible health raises child mortality rates, which tends to cause overpopulation and further burden the economy). 

Second, having widespread drought significantly increases a country's chances of exploding into civil war; when a large number of people are starving to death, they are much more likely to risk their lives as soldiers, and might be more sympathetic to radical leaders promising something better. As I explained in Chapter Three, Germany's exceptional suffering after their defeat in World War One (involving widespread unemployment, hyperinflation and mass starvation) contributed significantly to the rise of Adolf Hitler and eventually World War Two.  In addition, lack of water is thought to have contributed to violence in Sudan, Afghanistan and Palestine territory. If devastating drought were to engulf most of an extremely poor continent such as Africa, I fear that the drought would combine with poverty to create an unprecedented number of civil wars.

Third, I have constantly made reference to a boost of agricultural production as a means of escaping extreme poverty; when a region can suddenly produce more valuable food than ever before, they have the money to enter the Cycle of Prosperity (investments in health, education and infrastructure create more wealth to fund further investment). But when a population is chronically held beck by droughts resulting in low food supplies then they are less likely to achieve that boost of wealth and will remain stuck in poverty.

In addition to the horrible consequences of drought, climate change may also cause an increase in disease transmission. Many cities (such as Nairobi, Kenya) were built so that they are just above the "Mosquito line"; the cities are located in high altitude regions too cold for mosquitoes to live, thereby making the population protected from disease carrying insects such as mosquitoes carrying Malaria or tsetse flies carrying African Sleeping Sickness. Unfortunately, with global temperatures rising these cities are no longer too cold for these insects to live, exposing the population to a variety of serious illnesses. 

Perhaps the worst scenario would involve the melting and disintegration of huge glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica; many of the world's leading climate experts, including Columbia University Professor of Earth Sciences James Hansen, believe that sea level will rise dramatically over the next century as a result of (1) thermal expansion of sea waters and (2) the rapid disintegration of the ice shelves of Greenland and Antarctica (due to moulin formations). Hansen testifies:

"I find it almost inconceivable that "business as usual" climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in meters within a century... Indeed, the palaeoclimate record contains numerous examples of ice sheets yielding sea level rises of several metres per century when forcings were smaller than that of the business-as-usual scenario. For example, about 14,000 years ago, sea level rose approximately 20 metres in 400 years, or about 1 metre every 20 years. There is growing evidence that the global warming already under way could bring a comparably rapid rise in sea level."
-Jim Hansen, Columbia University Professor of Earth Sciences and head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Study
 
This is very bad news indeed; if sea level rose by more than one meter, then several low-lying countries would become flooded, including the impoverished nation of Bangladesh, where one third of the country (and half the rice-growing fields) will be submerged, and Maldives, home to more than 330'000, which will be completely underwater. A significant rise in sea level would not only harm poor nations; it could leave several major cities, including New York, London, Miami, and several major cities in China (all of which are home to millions of people) submerged as well. This effect is captured by the stunning photograph left (based on data from Jeremy Weiss and Jonathan Overpeck, University of Arizona) capturing the changes in Florida over the course of the next century if we continue emitting greenhouse gases at our current rate.

Although major catastrophic disasters will undoubtedly harm the rich world, it is the extremely impoverished populations which will suffer the most. As explained above, these people have very little money to fall back on in case disaster strikes, meaning that they will die in the greatest numbers (either from droughts causing mass starvation or increased disease transmission). Yet these impoverished nations have not contributed significantly to climate change; with their meager incomes, they can't afford coal-powered electricity or cars which run on oil.

Look at the maps below comparing carbon emissions by country; the map on the left shows the countries which are the worst culprits of global warming, with the highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases in red. The map on the right shows the countries with the highest number of deaths attributed to global warming, with the worst affected countries shown in red. As we can see, those which are the least responsible for climate change are suffering more than anyone else.

Is it moral to allow nations such as the Maldives to have their homes completely destroyed because of pollution which they are not responsible for? Should Bangladesh be flooded because of carbon particles which they did not emit? The climate change mortality rate for extremely impoverished regions is relatively small right now -only 70-120 deaths per million people, or roughly 50'000 dead each year. Yet this figure will undoubtedly grow exponentially larger in coming decades unless steps are taken by the richest nations to reduce carbon emissions. As global citizens, it is our moral duty to prevent Earth's poorest citizens from suffering for our mistakes; steps must be taken to reduce rich world carbon emissions before severe climate catastrophe devastates the extremely impoverished. 

In 2008, the Reality Coalition (made up of the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club) drew up a set of advertisements which alleged that there is no such thing as "Clean Coal Technology". Indeed, I agree that the term "Clean Coal" is often used as a smokescreen to fool voters into accepting the construction of large coal power plants which are in reality quite dirty, but the notion that clean coal technology does not exist is false. The advertisements failed to mention a new technological innovation known as "Carbon Capture and Sequestration" (or CCS).

Basically, a huge vacuum is placed inside the carbon-dioxide emitting power plant which sucks all the carbon dioxide (produced through burning coal) down into the Earth. The carbon dioxide is pumped into a large space underground -perhaps an underground lake, or an empty oil well- and then stays there for thousands of years (this is shown in the diagram left). Since the CO2 is not in the atmosphere, it cannot absorb heat and contribute to global warming. Carbon Capture and Sequestration machines can be placed on coal power plants as well as major industrial facilities -such as steel and cement factories- which produce huge carbon emissions. The use of CCS technology is one possible way of using cheap coal to power major cities without releasing carbon dioxide.  

So what kind of effect would a widespread adoption of CCS technology have? A 2005 study by economists Klaus Lackner and Jeffrey Sachs found that if the world gradually outfitted every major coal power plant and high carbon-emitting industrial facility (such as a cement or steel plant) with a CCS machine, then by 2050 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere would be 468 ppm, 92 ppm less than the projected 560 ppm! This reduction is enormous; roughly equal to the total amount of CO2 humans have put into the atmosphere since 1800.

Many critics of CCS technology argue that it simply costs too much money; currently, to place a CCS machine on a coal-powered plant would raise the price the energy made in that plant by 50%. This expensive energy would put a large burden on energy consumers -everyday Canadians powering their homes and small businesses (although I stress that the 50% increase would only be on coal-powered energy, not nuclear energy, meaning that actual energy prices would only increase by about 15-30%, varying by region). But we must remember that whenever a new technology is first introduced, it is always inevitably expensive. When the first commercially sold cell phone -Motorola's Dyna TAC 8000- first hit the markets in 1983, it cost $4000. But as more people began purchasing cell phones, scientists began finding ways easier ways to make them which greatly diminished their price; now, one can buy a cellphone for as little as ten or fifteen dollars. The same concept can be applied to CCS machines and renewable energy resources such as solar and wind power; as scientists research ways to make these technologies more efficient, they will tend to cost vastly less. I therefore advise that the governments of the rich world nations invest significant amounts of money into researching ways to make CCS and renewable energy technology more efficient; this with the aid of this research, the machines will become drastically more affordable and easier to implement in the future. 

One possible substitution for coal power is nuclear energy, produced by creating a small nuclear reaction which is then used to boil water, turn a turbine and generate electricity. Although environmentalists criticize nuclear reactors for generating carcinogenic nuclear waste, many have also complimented nuclear power for its ability to generate large amounts of electricity without producing carbon dioxide (I should also note that the odds of a nuclear accident, such as the one in Chernobyl, is extremely low with modern safety precautions in place). Nations such as France and Sweden have recently invested in the construction of large nuclear power plants to generate electricity for their major cities, and several regions within North America (including Ontario) have relied on nuclear energy to supply the majority of their electricity. To feed its growing appetite for energy, China has also invested billions in the construction of several large scale nuclear facilities with hopes of obtaining 5% of its total energy share from nuclear power by 2020. 

The main problem with nuclear energy is the issue of nuclear proliferation; the ingredients needed to make a nuclear reaction to generate electricity are the same ingredients used to make an atomic bomb. Should we allow places like Iran, who has rapidly increasing carbon emissions, to have the ingredients necessary to make an atom bomb when they have repeatedly threatened to attack Israel? What about nations such as Columbia or Bolivia, who have in the past fallen to coup d'etats? If we continue spreading the ingredients necessary to make an atom bomb, are we not seriously increasing the risk that their will be a devastating attack somewhere in the world?

And so although nuclear energy is an attractive option for much of the politically stable rich world (as well as regions such as China and India which have already acquired nuclear weapons), it seems as though it would be very risky to give these ingredients to unstable regimes throughout much of the Middle East, Africa and South America. To satisfy their growing appetites for energy, we must try to use primarily coal power, with the carbon emissions sequestered using CCS technology. 

Currently, transportation emissions (from cars, buses and airplanes) make up about 18% of the total carbon emissions given off by humanity; therefore if we are to solve the climate crisis, finding a way to make cars cleaner and less reliant on gasoline (an oil product) is of great importance. One means of making cars cleaner is to make them run on electricity instead of the carbon-based fossil fuel gasoline. The car's power would come from a large battery which would be recharged every night; the owner would simply insert a plug into the electrical outlet in his garage and the car would be recharged by morning. A date, electric cars have not been mass produced by major auto manufactures such as Nissan or Toyota because rechargeable batteries are very expensive to build and have very short lifespans. The Japanese automakers have instead preferred to build so-called Hybrid Electric Vehicles which run on half electricity (to make the car cleaner) and half gasoline (to allow the car to travel longer distances at higher speeds).

Traditionally, citizens of the West have been unconcerned about fuel economy -the distance your car can travel on one litre (or gallon) of gasoline.  Yet after the price of petroleum peaked at an astonishing $147 per barrel on July 11, 2008, consumers began paying close attention to the mileage of their vehicles; during this period, demand for fuel efficient cars such as the Toyota Prius and Daimler's Smart Car exploded as consumers worried that their gas guzzling trucks and SUVs were too expensive to continue driving. The huge boom in oil prices was mostly due to rising political instability in the Middle East (especially America's war in Iraq and the conflict between Iran and Israel) and the rising economies of China and India, whose increasing appetite for energy dramatically raised demand for oil. Although the price of oil has recently dropped to just $35 per barrel because of the gargantuan financial crisis beginning in September 2008, consumers have not forgotten about the volatility of the price of petroleum. The demand for fuel efficient vehicles has remained high since mid-2008, causing major gas-guzzling car manufactures such as General Motor's (owner of the Hummer brand) to sink into bankruptcy. And I stress that consumers are not wrong to value fuel-efficient vehicles highly -although the price of oil has gone down briefly, the huge energy demand in China and India will surely cause the price of petroleum to creep right back up to the $100 per barrel in the coming years.

High gas prices will likely cause a rapid surge of fuel efficient vehicles to enter the market as car manufactures struggle to keep up with the demand for hybrid electric vehicles. The world will gradually transition from cars which run on gasoline (using an internal combustion engine) to vehicles which run mostly or entirely on electricity, including Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles and full-fledged electric cars. Although this transition will undoubtedly occur, the governments of the rich world can help to speed up this transition by continuously introducing legislation which promotes higher fuel economy standards. For example, Canada could pass a law which says that by 2015, no car or truck sold in Canada can have a fuel economy less than 12 kilometers per litre  (30 miles per gallon). Or the government could give car buyers a tax rebate on all fuel efficient cars they buy, providing a financial incentive for consumers to opt for higher fuel economy cars instead of gas guzzlers. Through these actions, Canada will provide assurance to auto manufactures that fuel efficiency will continue to remain a high priority in coming years. With a little push from the government, auto manufactures could conceivably make large-scale rechargeable batteries at low cost in just two decades, helping to drastically reduce carbon emissions for decades to come.

Critics have pointed out that electric cars might not really reduce carbon emissions, since most of the electrical energy required to power the cars will be derived from burning coal (which releases carbon dioxide emissions). It is true that if 100% of the energy to power the cars was obtained from coal power plants, then the reduction would not be significant. But often, the electricity for a town or home is not 100% coal-powered; for example, in my home region of Southern Ontario, 51% of electricity is obtained through nuclear energy. In addition, with electric cars, all of the carbon dioxide emissions would be coming from one source; the coal power plant.  CCS machines cannot connect to and trap all of the carbon dioxide coming out of every car, but if all of the CO2 powering those cars was coming out of one big smokestack (at the power plant) instead of millions of little smoke stacks (the car exhaust pipes) then the machine could successfully capture and sequester the carbon dioxide emissions.

The solutions to global warming exist; a variety of sustainable technologies, including CCS machines and electric cars, offer ways to dramatically reduce human carbon emissions over the course of the next fifty years. But these technologies are currently expensive to use; corporations can save money simply by releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. In order to solve the climate crisis, we must force these companies to use this technology even when it is not necessarily cost effective by putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions (more on this below).

Unfortunately, the Kyoto Protocol had many flaws. First, the United States -which has just 5% of the world's population but emits 25% of all carbon emissions- is as of 2009 the only industrialized nation to refuse to ratify the treaty. Their refusal to cooperate has sent a wave of pessimism down the spine of each country which did ratify the treaty. For example, Canada, which was on the verge of signing the treaty back in 2002, almost declined to ratify the agreement because they feared that Canadian companies (burdened by a carbon tax) would be outpaced by American companies who were exempt from the carbon tax (Canada did eventually sign onto the treaty, but is projected to not meet its desired goal). The United States, under the Bush administration, failed to ratify the agreement because they argued that the costs of reducing carbon emissions was too high relative to the benefits. To most of the world, this argument was outrageous; here was one of the richest nations on the planet saying that it could not afford to implement sound environmental policies. Meanwhile, other nations, such as Japan, Finland, Germany and France were all able to significantly reduce carbon emissions while maintaining a very high level of wealth. Many politicians in the United States feared that taxing carbon (through a direct carbon tax or a cap and trade program) would raise energy prices to unbearably high levels and make American industries uncompetitive. Yet according to US congressional representative Henry Waxman, the same argument was made when the United States implemented a cap and trade program on sulfur dioxide, a toxic emission from coal plants which mixed with water vapor to form acid rain. When a bill which would severely limit sulfur dioxide emissions was trying to get passed, the coal companies argued that the legislation would dramatically raise energy prices for electricity consumers and cause enormous numbers of Americans to lose their jobs. When the legislation was finally passed (virtually solving the problem in just two years time), the program ended up costing one tenth of what the coal companies predicted.

Since the United States is a sovereign nation with a powerful political presence in the world, it is difficult to "force" them to enact legislation to would put limits on carbon emissions. Yet in his book Making Globalization Work, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (whom I referenced in the last chapter when discussing currency reserves) offers a compelling suggestion to do just this.

The World Trade Organization is set up to prevent something known as "Trade Protectionism". Protectionism occurs when one country favors its own domestic products over of products from other countries. For example, say Canada wants to promote Canadian steel companies, so it gives its domestic steel industry a huge amount of money (a "subsidy") to lower the cost of the steel it produces. This can give the Canadian steel company an edge over its competitors, since the company can now sell steel at a much cheaper price for a profit thanks to the subsidy by the Canadian government. This may seem like it benefits Canada, but if every country did this then governments around the world would be pouring huge amounts of money into subsidies for their corporations, leaving the governments pennyless. One of the main purposes of the World Trade organization is to prevent government subsidies for their domestic products (trade protectionism) so that the regions which have the ability to make a certain product (such as steel) for less money will naturally dominate their competitive field, bringing lower prices for consumers. The World Trade Organization thus serves to level the playing fields, making governments around the world unable to impose artificial subsidies which distort market prices. If a government does end up going against World Trade Organization rules and subsidizes its products, then the WTO allows countries importing those products to put huge tariffs (taxes) on the imports to counter the subsidy. Thus a government never subsidizes it own products, since the government is in effect just transferring money over to foreign governments when the foreign government introduces a counter tariff. 

How does this relate to carbon emissions? Well, as I mentioned before, the World Trade Organization can prevent countries from subsidizing their own domestic industries. When the United States refuses to tax its steel industry for polluting the entire planet with high carbon emissions when every other country is forcing their steel companies to pay a carbon tax, the US is in effect giving its domestic steel industry a kind of subsidy. If every steel producing company throughout Europe forces their steel sectors to pay a tax, then European steel will be more expensive than American steel, giving the American companies an advantage. The American government is well aware of this fact, so it continues to refuse to put a carbon tax on its steel industry. As I mentioned earlier, the WTO allows countries receiving subsidized products to put counter tariffs on those products, thus eliminating a government's desire to subsidize its own domestic industry. Stiglitz' idea is for the World Trade Organization to officially consider refusal to place a carbon tax on domestic products -not forcing their firms to pay for the environmental damage they inflict- a form of subsidy; since these American companies are not paying for the damage they are doing to the global environment, they would be considered in effect getting a subsidy.

Stiglitz suggests that countries which have ratified the Kyoto Protocol -countries like Japan, European nations and Canada- should tax the import of American goods that are produced in ways which unnecessarily harm the environment. In other words, counter tariffs should be put in place on products relative to the amount of greenhouse gas they produce. In his book Making Globalization Work, Stiglitz explains this mechanism:

"It would work like this. Assume, for instance, that American-produced steel sells for $500 per ton, and that in the process of producing that ton of steel, two tons of carbon are emitted. The price of a ton of carbon is, say, $30 (the price of the European carbon trading system in early 2006). Because America did not join the Kyoto Protocol and its firms are under no obligation to reduce carbon emissions, they are in effect being subsidized to the tune of $60 per ton of steel. Thus, European and other countries could levy a tax on American steel of $60 per ton (just over 10%). This would provide strong incentives for companies to reduce their carbon emissions."
-Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work

This is an excellent idea which would put heavy external pressure on countries which did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol -such as the United States- to reduce their carbon emissions.

Although both China and India are officially ratified members of the Kyoto Protocol, as "transitioning economies" (countries transitioning from poverty to wealth) they were exempt from any penalties associated with not reducing their carbon emissions. I agree that it is unreasonable to expect countries which are rapidly getting wealthier to reduce their carbon emissions to 1990 levels, as their enormous increases in wealth will surely cause their per capita carbon emissions to go up dramatically. But at the same time, we cannot simply ignore China and India and allow their carbon emissions to rise to unsustainable levels. As I explained before, in coming years several of Earth's transitioning economies will be responsible for dramatic increases in Earth's climate; their populations will cause humanity's total annual carbon emissions to rise from 36 billion tons of CO2 (the current rate) to 60 billion tons in just 14 years. If we want to dramatically reduce carbon emission trends in order to avert disaster, we must incorporate China and India. 

One means of incorporating China and India would be to put the same tax on carbon emissions in every country of the world; say, $30 per ton of carbon emitted.  The money collected from all this tax would go to the nation where the tax was collected. For example, if India's carbon tax generates $70 billion in tax revenue, then $70 billion in tax revenue will be given to the Indian government. If China's tax generates $150 billion, then the Chinese government will be given $150 billion. By placing a universal tax on all carbon emissions at a fixed rate, we give corporations in all regions of the world the financial incentive to invest in ways to reduce their carbon dioxide pollution and thus curb global warming.

However, developing nations such as China and India argue that rich world countries have been polluting for many years, so the transitioning economies should be allowed to pollute more as compensation. There is much controversy over exactly how much these transitioning nations will have to pay for their carbon emissions, and while the world debates the planet continues to get warmer. If the universal carbon tax solution turns out to be unpopular and the developing nations still continue to be uncooperative, then I suggest that the rich world nations offer to perform currency reform in exchange for China and India's agreement to put a sufficient carbon tax in place. As explained in Chapter Six, the world's inefficient currency system costs nations such as China billions of dollars every year. An offer to reform this system in exchange for developing countries' cooperation in the environmental movement could give the financial incentive needed persuade nations such as China and India into saving the planet.

As mentioned earlier, when plants such as trees and flowers photosynthesize they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen, acting as a kind of Carbon Sink.  But as humanity continues destroying major forests, such as the tropical rainforests in South America, the Earth's natural systems become less able to absorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Deforestation has accounted for 19% of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increase over the past two hundred years, roughly equal to the total contribution of all the cars, buses and airplanes on the planet. Therefore reducing the rate of deforestation is another essential ingredient in the effort to avoid the climate crisis.

Surprisingly, the spread of deforestation is a relatively easy problem to solve. Most people think that deforestation is mostly performed by major corporations in an effort to produce paper products or other valuable materials. But in reality, most deforestation is performed by the expanding populations of impoverished societies (such as those in New Guinea or Brazil) which seek to "slash and burn" forests to clear the way for new crops and pastures. But most of the land they clear is of low agricultural quality -the soil is filled with toxic aluminum particles and is unusually acidic, which is great for many of the tropical plants that make up the rain forest, but lethal to most agricultural crops.

If we simply paid the farmers to not destroy these forests, then we could dramatically slow or stop deforestation in just a few years. Currently, the Kyoto Protocol pays countries for reforestation (planting new trees) but not for avoiding deforestation. This was a huge mistake, since it gave countries such as Papua New Guinea an incentive to cut down all their trees and then plant new ones; countries should receive payments for maintaining their forests, giving them an incentive not to cut them down.  At the small price of about $6 for each hectare of forests saved (or $10 per ton of CO2 emission absorbed) we can give farmers a strong incentive to maintain their forests, helping to keep Earth's carbon sink undamaged for the next few decades.

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