http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1211-02.htm
Published on Thursday,
December 11, 2003 by Salon.com
Global Trade = Global Warming
by Kumar Venkat
Recent news that Russia is unlikely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol
-- which would deliver a deathblow to the world's first climate
change pact -- comes at a time when the need for a comprehensive
international agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions has never
been greater. One of the reasons is the link between expanding
global trade and climate change.
Just one early impact
of increasing long-distance trade is
the emerging issue of "food miles." The fossil-fuel
energy
spent to transport food products often exceeds the energy
contained in the foods themselves. To add insult to injury,
transportation is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions.
Sustain, a U.K.-based
food and farming alliance, has shown
that iceberg lettuce flown from Los Angeles to London requires
127 calories of fuel for every food calorie. Sustain also
reports that countries often end up swapping food instead
of importing critical items that cannot be produced locally.
The U.K., for example, imported 126 million liters of milk
and exported 270 million liters in 1997.
Researchers at Iowa
State University have found that fruits
and vegetables travel an average of 1,500 miles within the
U.S., a 22 percent increase since 1981. When imported foods
are added to the mix, the average distance from farm to the
dinner table increases significantly. Studies show that a
basic diet with imported ingredients can easily consume
four times the fossil-fuel energy and emit four times the
carbon dioxide compared to domestically produced ingredients.
Merchandise trade currently
accounts for only about
20 percent of global GDP, with agriculture representing
just a small part of global trade. But even at these
relatively low levels of trade, the transportation sector
consumes nearly 60 percent of the world's oil and produces
a quarter of all energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions.
Oil use by transportation has almost doubled since 1973.
Transportation-related emissions are growing at about
2.5 percent annually -- faster than any other sector
in the economy.
Any dramatic increase
in global trade could add substantially
to the world's annual carbon-dioxide emissions. Particularly
problematic is the growing use of trucks and airplanes at
the expense of slower and more efficient trains and ships.
Technological breakthroughs for freight transport are not
yet on the horizon. Improvements in fuel efficiency are
possible, but studies show that they would encourage more
long-distance transport due to lower operating costs and
are unlikely to prevent emissions growth in the face of
increasing demand.
Given the general scientific
consensus that carbon-dioxide
emissions will have to drop below 1990 levels within a
few decades in order to stabilize the climate at the lower
end of various warming scenarios, long-distance trade poses
a serious challenge. If the world's future economic development
depends largely on global trade, then in the absence of
radically new transportation technologies, we are likely
to face the ultimate conflict between the economy and the
environment. If global trade in agricultural products is
the only way out of poverty for hundreds of millions of
rural poor in developing countries, the conflict may well
turn out to have an additional tragic dimension.
The very essence of
trade -- transporting goods from producers
to consumers -- takes a toll on the environment. Free trade
may appear to be the solution to many economic problems when
social and environmental "externalities" are ignored.
Global
warming is only one such externality, but its sheer scale
and complexity make it a litmus test for whether the emerging
global economy can be sustained in the long run.
Remarkably, the World
Trade Organization and the World Bank
-- the two premier institutions that promote global trade
-- are silent about the links between trade, transportation
and climate. And there are no policies or plans in place
for the enormous task of replacing the world's freight
transportation infrastructure with a cleaner, low-emissions
version.
A missing link in today's
globalizing economy is a way
for the market to sense the environmental costs of trade.
An international agreement to cap and trade greenhouse-gas
emissions -- going beyond the Kyoto Protocol to include
emissions from international freight transport -- would
allow the market to respond by choosing optimal trading
distances. Limits on emissions would also spur the
development of next-generation technologies for freight
transport.
Without timely and
effective environmental regulation
at the international level, global trade may well fail
the test of sustainability -- and leave the world poorer
instead of richer.
Kumar Venkat works
in Silicon Valley's high-tech industry
and writes about the social and environmental impacts of
technology.
Copyright 2003 Salon.com
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