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Is China the key to success at Copenhagen?
‘In short, China has gone from a slow-growing, insular country to the world’s second-largest economy and largest exporter in a single generation […] Commensurate with China’s economic growth has been its growth in CO2 emissions.’
–Kurt Zenz House, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Administrative Regions of China and large, industrial point sources of carbon dioxide by sector, by PNNL - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
Kurt Zenz House is a fellow at MIT, where he ‘studies and develops methods for large-scale capture and storage of human-made carbon dioxide’. He has a bachelor’s in physics from the Claremont Colleges and a PhD in geoscience from Harvard. Esquire named House among the Best and Brightest for 2007 and he is one of Technology Review Magazine’s Top 35 Innovators Under 35 for 2009. In other words he is a ‘global warming alarmist’, leftist international conspirator and of course not a real scientist. If he were a real scientist he’d be working for an oil company or a think tank called something like the American Freedom Foundation.
But seriously, whether you agree with carbon capture and storage or not, Dr. House (isn’t it cool that there’s a real Dr. House out there?) is working on practical ways to reduce global CO2 emissions. He also has a practical view on carbon emissions and China:
‘The main point is that China’s economic growth over the last 30 years was largely facilitated by the economic development in the West over the last 100 years. In other words, U.S. emissions 50 years ago helped create the market for Chinese goods today. Thus, the arithmetic of differential responsibility isn’t as easy as summing up everybody’s emissions over time. Considering this, it’s time for China to come to the table and offer a commitment commensurate with its responsibility as a new emitter and economic power.’
Read House’s entire article entitled ‘A thought for Copenhagen and beyond’ in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
List of articles by Kurt Zenz House for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Discovery News – DOUBLE TAKE: To Bury or Not to Bury CO2
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory news page
Tags: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, capture and storage, carbon emissions, co2, Dr. House, emissions, Kurt Zenz House
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