Now, back to those arguments I cited that are being made in Thailand at the Kyoto-related talks by China, India, and Brazil in order to avoid being cornered into making promises of their own to reduce emissions, a natural request given their heated claims about the calamity they confront in the face of ever-increasing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Reuters’ treatment focuses on a different angle, focusing instead on the monumental achievement of poor countries’ GHG “reductions”:

“Developing nations that are fast industrializing, such as China and India, have braked their rising greenhouse gas emissions by more than the total cuts demanded of rich nations by the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol.
A draft U.N. report, to be released in Bangkok on Friday after talks between governments and scientists, also shows that policies meant to curb air pollution from factories or cars or to save energy, have had a side-effect of fighting global warming.’Efforts undertaken by developing countries (i.e. Brazil, China, India and Mexico) for reasons other than climate change have reduced [sic] their emissions growth over the past 3 decades by approximately 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year,’ according to a technical summary seen by Reuters.It said that was ‘more than the reductions required from (developed nations) by the Kyoto Protocol’.”

And what do we have to thank for this “reduc[tion in] their emissions growth”?

“China’s one-child per couple policy introduced in the early 1980s, for instance, had a side-effect of braking global warming by limiting the population to 1.3 billion against a projected 1.6 billion without the policy. ‘This has reduced [sic] greenhouse gas emissions,’ [China’s EPA chief] told a conference in Oslo last month.“

Several points to make. First, this kind of “but-for” argument cannot be disproven…any more than it can be proven. Except, however, when they use words so carelessly (or intentionally disingenuously) by claiming, e.g., that they have “reduced their emissions growth”; no, no one has reduced their emissions growth there, but only accelerated it. What they have done, hypothetically, is avoid a higher rate of growth but, again, purely hypothetically. It is just anti-population advocacy… as is climate alarmism, as one readily discerns simply by listening to the alarmists themselves.

By this, er, logic, despite the massive increase in land-, sea- and air-borne vehicle use it prompted, killing tens of millions in WWII “reduced the world’s emissions growth”. As did post-war Stalinist terror, the Chinese mass die-offs, and Pol Pot (actually these latter population reductions sans air, sea and truck flotillas really did). As my colleague Myron Ebell points out, “The Chinese are correct that they have done more than anyone to [avoid] emissions through their reprehensible population control policies. We could make the same claim about our unlimited abortion policies. And since our per capita emissions are much higher, we could make a large claim of emissions avoided.” By only having two children my wife and I have “reduced”, in their parlance, our emissions significantly because she really wanted 10. I want my credits to sell now please.