Essay by Eric Worrall
“… If industries resist, strict regulations may be required to enforce change or even force noncompliant companies to shut shop. …”
Time to fix responsibility for climate change
By Hu Yong | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2026-01-26 06:43MA XUEJING/CHINA DAILY
Global warming is one of the biggest challenges faced by humanity today. As emissions continue to rise, global temperatures keep breaking records and the world’s poorest nations bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.
However, public discourse on climate responsibility remains mired in individualism. Citizens are told to recycle, go vegan and shrink their “carbon footprints” while systemic sources of emissions — from industrial production to state-backed fossil fuel subsidies — remain largely untouched. It is time the global conversation shifts from personal virtue to structural accountability, from lifestyle tweaks to large-scale political and economic reform.
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Carbon emissions are linked to economic activity. Data show that 63 percent of emissions come from poor or developing countries, countries where the people are not rich, but are trying to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. In order to become middle or upper-class, lower income countries are forced to emit. Urging a developing country to cut back is an attempt to constrain its development, especially when today’s rich countries emitted freely on their way to prosperity.
…Politicians must understand that addressing climate change can be a decisive factor in their political success or failure. They need to tackle climate change substantively — not through symbolic actions like banning plastic straws, but by addressing the largest sources of emissions, such as coal and oil. Policy measures, including support to green technologies and investing heavily in innovations, would help. If industries resist, strict regulations may be required to enforce change or even force noncompliant companies to shut shop. With adequate funding, this strategy could disrupt the existing cycle and help lower prices.
Read more: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202601/26/WS69769cb4a310d6866eb359f5.html
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Developing countries like China get a free pass because they “are forced to emit”. But rich country politicians “must understand that addressing climate change can be a decisive factor in their political success or failure”.
The absurdity of this thinking is if CO2 was a problem, it wouldn’t matter whether the CO2 was emitted by rich countries or poor countries. It’s like Professor Hu Yong is demanding a free pass for developing countries to wreck the planet, while developed countries cut back to give them space. If the world truly had exhausted its carbon budget, everyone would have to cut back on emissions, developed or not.
Thankfully CO2 is not a problem. By every reasonable measure the global climate is improving, thanks to CO2 fertilisation. The world is becoming more benign for plant life, more able to sustain food production and create prosperity for Earth’s billions of people.
Even better, vast tracts of land which were too cold to farm are becoming arable, with far more to come if warming continues.
Global warming is no threat to survival. We should be emitting as much CO2 as possible, building a buffer against the ongoing Late Cenzoic Ice Age which still has the world in its grip, not panicking over every ounce of emitted CO2. Global cooling is what we should fear.
