Opinion: Climate cowards — and heroes

Many Americans think of China and India as economic juggernauts because of their rapid progress in recent decades. But it’s worth remembering that both countries remain vastly poorer than the United States or Europe.

The material living standards of a typical Chinese citizen are only one-fourth as high as that of a typical American, and the equivalent fraction for an Indian is one-ninth. Hundreds of millions of people in both China and India live in poverty, unable to afford basics — decent food, shelter, medical care and education — that Westerners take for granted.

All of which makes especially impressive China’s and India’s recent commitment to combating climate change. For them, any sacrifice of economic growth means much more than it does in the United States or Europe. Yet both China and India are well ahead of their targets for reducing carbon emissions, as set by the Paris Agreement.

“China’s emissions of carbon dioxide appear to have peaked more than 10 years sooner than its government had said they would,” The Times’s Editorial Board writes in today’s paper. “And India is now expected to obtain 40 percent of its electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2022, eight years ahead of schedule.

”As the editorial notes — and I encourage you to read it — their progress also highlights the cowardice and short-sightedness of the Trump administration’s climate stance. “China and India are finding that doing right by the planet need not carry a big economic cost and can actually be beneficial,” as the editorial notes.

On the same subject, let me put in a plug for the work being done by the climate team in The Times’s newsroom. As many readers may know, the newsroom and Opinion operate separately at The Times. So I’m a reader of the climate team’s work, not a contributor to it, and I regularly marvel at it, including this recent series on the disintegration of Antartica’s ice sheet.

The climate team is led by Hannah Fairfield, a former graphics editor at The Times and The Washington Post, and includes a group of top journalists.

The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Nick Sifuentes on why New York’s recent subway problems are largely Governor Cuomo’s fault.