Netting Net Zero.

• Author: Hochman, Thomas

In the past decade, emissions from the developing world have eclipsed those of the West. China, still considered a developing nation, now pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire developed world combined. India, with its booming economy, could surpass the United States' carbon output by 2030. All across the Global South--from Indonesia to Libya to Vietnam--people are using more energy and building out more fossil fuel infrastructure than ever before.

This poses a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy in Western climate policy. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that the key to climate action lay with the West: if the United States and Europe could just decarbonize, many reasoned, then global emissions would plummet. But today, the West is decarbonizing--Europe has seen its emissions drop by 24 percent since 1990, and America's co2 output is falling every year. Even as the ongoing energy crisis forces countries like Germany to reopen their coal plants, it has simultaneously led Europe to double down on its clean energy commitments--from fifty-billion-dollar nuclear build-outs in France to doubled wind power investment in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the world's emissions continue to climb. The reality is that the vast majority of future emissions are coming--and will continue to come--from the developing world.

That is the bad news. But there is good news too: in the vast majority of industrializing countries, the quality of life is skyrocketing--life expectancy has shot up, and child mortality is down nearly 70 percent. By nearly every metric, from income to living conditions to quality of education, people in the developing world are living healthier, happier lives than they were fifty years ago.

Oil, gas, and coal have been crucial to this development. Indeed, in cooking fuels, in factories, and in most national grids, fossil fuels play a vital role in developing economies. But herein lies the tension in the push for global decarbonization: as economies grow, so too does the demand for energy. Emissions, inevitably, go up. And with a Global South that is poised to industrialize, this tension could grow into the defining climate issue of the twenty-first century.

The current outlook for global energy use is not what it was half a century ago. Climate change is a leading issue in public discourse. Renewables and fracked natural gas have all but replaced coal power in North America. Solar is now the cheapest electricity source in history. By all accounts, a new global energy economy is emerging.

But with a system as complex as a national energy grid, competitive prices alone are not enough to spur third-world decarbonization. Questions remain about the reliability of renewables, and path dependence--the notion that energy systemsare prone to "technological lock-in"--is a real phenomenon. Vietnam is currently building coal plants, as one report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) puts it, for the simple reason that it built coal plants in the past.

Yearsof fossil fuel dominance--combined with renewable energy's continued limitations--have put economic growth at apparent odds with net zero in the developing world. What is to be done?

The world of climate and energy policy is divided on the appropriate response to this challenge. So-called "eco-modernists," for example, argue that developing economies should pursue a by-any-means-necessary approach to industrialization. In practice, this means that, as demand rises, countries will look to cheap, non-intermittent energy sources like natural gas. Though emissions will increase, so will prosperity--and the West, ecomodernists contend, has no right to get in the way. Alex Trembath, the deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute, an ecomodernist think tank, explains:

The wealthy world should not impede lower and middle-income countries from exploiting natural resources that we also currently use. That means coal, oil, and natural gas principally--but in a more sweeping view, poor countries should be able to determine their own destiny as best they can. Ecomodernists like Trembath argue that the West itself relied heavily on fossil fuels when it industrialized. Demanding that poor countries do otherwise would therefore represent a major double standard. But this isn't just the most moral way of...