46 Asia The EconomistSeptember 21st 2019
2Banyan Cold command
I
t is notjust that Asia accounts for the
greatest proportion of the world’s
carbon emissions, with China the biggest
emitter, India the third-biggest, and
Japan, South Korea and Indonesia all
among the top dozen. Asians are also the
most vulnerable to climate catastrophe,
with melting Tibetan glaciers, less pre-
dictable rains upon which its farmers
depend, and fiercer storms and rising sea
levels threatening huge, sinking mega-
cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai
and Shanghai.
By and large, national governments in
Asia acknowledge the challenge. A bane-
ful exception is Australia, whose conser-
vative government is running away from
climate commitments. Its failure to
show the way in cutting emissions has
only reinforced an argument which,
increasingly, Asian environmentalists as
well as self-serving autocrats make: that
a crisis as severe (if man-made) as rising
temperatures can be mitigated only by
the firm smack of authoritarian rule.
Democracies huff and puff and, prey to
vested interests and voters’ distaste for
hard choices, ultimately shirk the task.
America under President Donald
Trump, who wants to pull out of the Paris
agreement, underscores the case. Global
leadership on climate falls, by default, to
China. The Communist Party first baked
climate change into planning in 1990.
The policy output has been prolific. It
includes a national climate-change
programme and a renewable-energy law.
By 2017 China had cut the carbon dioxide
emitted per unit of gdpby 46% com-
pared with 2005, three years ahead of
schedule. It says 20% of its energy will
come from non-fossil sources by 2030.
The choices China makes will becritical if the world has a chance of keep-
ing temperature rises to no more than
1.5°C. Above all, coal use needs to fall
sharply—easy improvements to date in
carbon efficiency are not enough. Yet for
all that China is far and away the biggest
manufacturer and user of solar tech-
nology, it remains the hungriest user of
coal. After a two-year pause in breaking
ground for new coal-fired power stations,
last year China began the construction of
28 gwof new capacity. The total capacity
under construction, 235gw, will boost
Chinese coal power by a quarter. As for the
Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to
boost Chinese prestige abroad by helping
countries build infrastructure, a quarter of
its energy projects are coal-fired stations.
The 136 belt-and-road countries account
for 28% of global carbon emissions. With-
out decarbonisation, that ratio would
rocket to 66% by 2050, according to a study
backed by Tsinghua University.
Authoritarian environmentalism,
then, may excel at producing policies but
be no better than democratic environ-
mentalism at producing good outcomes—and probably worse. Policy driven by
bureaucratic and technocratic elites,
with almost no input, monitoring or
modification from those who make up
civil society, has real drawbacks: think of
the provincial governments in China
that lie about their coal-use figures and
of the supposedly clean, China-backed
hydropower projects on South-East
Asia’s giant rivers that are wreaking
havoc with fish and water flows.
Meanwhile, even corrupt, messy
India can get some things done. For three
years in a row, it has invested more in
renewable energy than in fossil fuels—
helped by a sharp rise in coal taxes and
steep falls in the price of solar power
(plus 300 sunny days a year). Power not
generated by fossil fuels should reach
60% of the total by 2030.
India is a paragon neither of democra-
cy nor of environmentalism. Yet non-
governmental and other independent
civic groups piping up about the envi-
ronment are surely better than the man-
dated silence in China. And even peccant
democracies like Australia’s can change
course. As it is, state-level governments
have ambitious renewables targets,
while nine-tenths of Australians say the
federal government’s climate policy is
not good enough.
If governments don’t go after climate,
climate will go after them. When Cyclone
Nargis killed an estimated 140,000 peo-
ple in Myanmar in 2008, the lying in-
competence of the junta that ran the
country at the time hastened its demise.
When Communist leaders in China deal
with natural disasters, such as the huge
earthquake in Sichuan days after Nargis,
they know their legitimacy is on the line.
Climate is going to test many states in
Asia to destruction, but authoritarian
ones most of all.Are authoritarian states better than democratic ones at fighting climate change?further 5m in Vietnam. But in several of the
afflicted countries the regulation and
monitoring of livestock and the reporting
of outbreaks is patchy, to say the least,
making it hard to be certain how far the dis-
ease has spread. North Korea, for instance,
has disclosed only a single occurrence, on
the border with China on May 23rd, even
though the arrival of the disease in the
South suggests it has travelled the length of
the country. The site of the first known out-
break in Myanmar, meanwhile, is Shan
state, a lawless region controlled in large
part by militias suspicious of the centralgovernment.
Surprisingly, Thailand, home to cp
Foods, the biggest pork producer outside
America and China, seems to have avoided
the affliction so far, even though it has long
and largely unguarded borders with three
of the affected countries. That may be be-
cause pig-farming there tends to be on a
bigger scale than elsewhere in the region,
says Dirk Pfeiffer of City University in Hong
Kong. In contrast, small farms, which pro-
duce much of the pork in China and South-
East Asia, are particularly susceptible.
Many smallholders either lack the exper-tise to protect their animals or cannot af-
ford the fencing and uncontaminated feed
needed to keep the disease at bay.
That is not the problem in South Korea.
High standards of food safety and report-
ing and well-functioning compensation
mechanisms for farmers mean that it will
probably be able to contain swine fever rel-
atively successfully, says Mr Pfeiffer. South
Koreans may have to pay a bit more for
their barbecued pork in the months to
come. But the country’s pig farmers are less
likely than their counterparts elsewhere in
the region to face complete destitution. 7