“The most important issues here, to me, are the related topics of China and climate change. I used to think the engagement with China strategy made sense, and I thought the people who objected to it were mostly driven by economic ignorance about the benefits of free trade. I still think the economic arguments for free trade are sound, but the actual geopolitical situation has evolved to the point where it’s clear that commercial ties between the United States and China were not fostering world peace or the liberalization of Chinese society.
Unfortunately, a lot of what’s happened since the conventional wisdom shifted on China is just unprincipled protectionism.
I think that’s wrong. Reducing dependence on imported Chinese manufactured goods is like trying to make sure we have the capacity to produce more ammunition — it’s not an economic policy at all, it’s a national security policy that involves incurring economic costs. We should be freeing up trade with the rest of the world, especially with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Which is just to say that the China situation has made me more supportive of ideas I would have rejected in the past, like increasing the defense budget, while continuing to feel that the new post-neoliberal ideas, on both the left and the right, are basically wrong.
But this really comes crashing into the mainstream progressive view of climate policy. Since the mid-Bush years, American carbon dioxide emissions have fallen nearly 20 percent, while global emissions have risen by over 20 percent.
Just to clarify that I am not a knuckle-dragging moron, the following standard environmentalist points are all true:
- On a per capita basis, American emissions are still exceptionally high.
- On a historical basis, America is still the major contributor to climate pollution.
- The countries poised to suffer most from climate change are not the ones that have benefitted most from industrialization.
Those three considerations do add up, in my opinion, to a compelling moral case for American climate leadership. That said, the cold hard fact that I’ve come around to is that while it would be worth it for the United States of America to bear significant economic costs to avert climate change, it is literally not possible for us to do that. Given that the United States needs tax revenue, we can and should price the externality associated with our domestic carbon dioxide consumption. And we should fund clean energy innovation, continue to drive down the cost of batteries and solar panels, and make complementary regulatory changes to try to speed the deployment of long-range transmission lines, along with geothermal, small modular reactors, and fusion power. But China is doing a lot of that innovation and deployment right now and also building tons of coal plants, and we have no way of stopping them.
Instead of wrestling with these realities, American environmentalists are too often shopping ideas like denying poor countries financing for their own industrialization or trying to stop the United States from supplying the world with natural gas. These ideas almost certainly won’t work as environmental policy, because countries that want natural gas will just get the gas and the financing from other less friendly countries. And if they did work, the outcomes wouldn’t be desirable — trying to reduce emissions by choking off economic development in poor countries inverts the moral logic of the whole argument.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-i-went-from-left-to-center-left