Climate Change and Globalization

Globalization is often seen as an enemy in the conflict against climate change. Climate activists sail to international conferences to condemn airlines and shipping companies for their polluting ways and call on consumers to limit their "food miles"--the distance that dinner traveled from farm to plate. To be sure, there's a strong historical relationship between closer global ties and higher greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. That's primarily because globalization has driven income growth, and until recently, more economic output per person was very closely associated with more output of carbon dioxide per person (Figure 1). But that relationship is breaking down (Figure 2), and globalization can take a good part of the credit for that as well. Going forward, the best way--indeed, the only morally and politically plausible way--to reach climate stability is to harness the immense power of globalization for sustainable planetary progress. Globalization has powered worldwide prosperity and well- being. Exports have contributed to rapid growth in many cases, such as the UK's industrial revolution and the performance of the "East Asian miracle" countries, including South Korea and Taiwan. Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar's essay for Cato's Defending Globalization project reports that India's per capita income rose from $304 in 1991 to an estimated $2,600 in 2023, and that was driven in part by a considerable growth in trade. India accounted for 0.45 percent of global exports in 1986; that has climbed to a 1.5 percent share of global merchandise exports and 4.1 percent of global services exports. Meanwhile, the role of imports in improving global life expectancy can't be questioned when most countries don't manufacture vaccines or antibiotics. And that's to say nothing of the global spread of knowledge and ideas. The world's unhealthiest countries (in the fifth percentile of the distribution of life expectancy) see higher life expectancies than the world's healthiest countries (at the 95th percentile) did a century ago. That we have seen such truly global progress against poverty and premature death surely suggests global processes at work.