Thinking about emissions like a developing country leader

Why fighting poverty is —and will remain— the biggest driver of emissions growth worldwide.

Imagine this is you office

You’re a high level leader in a developing country. (At least, for the purposes of this thought experiment you are.)

Maybe you run a public utility company in Indonesia, or you’re the energy minister in Pakistan. Maybe you’re the president of Paraguay, or you run the state oil company in Nigeria, or a major cement company in Algeria or China.

Whatever your position is, you’re the kind of person who’s actively making the big, macro-level decisions that will determine the future of climate emissions. After all, 85% of new demand for energy comes from developing countries these days, so the key decisions about the future of emissions will be made by people like you.

Understanding understanding the pressures they face should be —though seldom is— at the top of every climate activist’s to do list.

What what pressures do you face?

It’s a good bet you’re beset on all sides by demands for the kinds of things that cause greenhouse gas emissions to rise. The children of your country’s farmers are moving to your cities, where they’re more productive, earn more, consume more energy and demand more emissions-intensives goods and services.

These are people working flat out to escape poverty and join the middle class. They can tell they made it when they can afford an air conditioner for their homes, or to fly to see their relatives instead of taking the bus or the train as they always had.

Catering to the aspirations of people escaping poverty is by far the most emissions-intensive thing human beings do.

It is the reason emissions continue to rise, globally.

Your job, as a leader in a developing country, boils down to figuring out how to satisfy these new demands at least adequately enough to keep your job. Because when newly middle class people flick a switch, they expect the lights to come on, and they’ll hold you accountable for it if they don’t.

Now, remember you’re facing all these demands in the context of hard budget constraints. You are a developing country leader, you help run a place where capital is limited, household budgets are stretched, technological capacity is finite, public finances are often rickety and there’s just no excess to throw around at expensive or experimental policies.

Granted, once a year your government will send a delegation on a nice diplomatic junket to wherever it is the UN’s COP conference is happening that year, and they’ll come back having pledged to make this or that much progress fighting climate change. And sure, the commitments your country makes in that context will be one of the things you consider as you decide what policies your government, or your company will follow.

But let’s get real: as a developing world leader you’ll basically never pay a penalty for breaking a COP pledge. But you’ll certainly pay a penalty if you don’t keep the economy growing and the lights on.

This is the piece that degrowth narratives just can’t cope with. There may be some abstract sense in which degrowth would be better, on the aggregate, for most people. But it’s a hell of a coordination challenge because on the ground, the people making the decisions that matter pretty much all face strong pressure to deliver growth. You can’t just wish that part of it away.

Delivering growth is a matter of career survival for you if you wield power in the developing world. In democratic countries, you can be voted out, but even if you help run an autocracy, you pretty much always find that your best shot at staying in power is to deliver a rising standard of living, and the only known way to do that is to deliver growth.

The reality is that, as of 2024, the vast bulk of leaders in the developing world, faced with the real-world incentive structures they face, will rationally make decisions that cause greenhouse gas emissions to grow.

As a developing world leader, nothing that happens at a COP can really change those incentives: a bigger economy, with more satisfied people, is what your constituents expect, what they demand, and what you, as a rational policy-maker, will try to deliver.

Developing country leaders won’t always succeed. On rare occasions the people in power are so thuggish, hapless or corrupt they’ll fail to even keep the lights on. South Africa and my own country of origin, Venezuela, are good examples of places where a spectacularly incompetent government has led to falling emissions. But in such cases, emissions are falling because the country is a basketcase, bleeding migrants and failing in disastrous ways. Those cases do exist, but they’re thankfully rare. And nobody wants to emulate them.

The much more common outcome is found in places like Vietnam, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Egypt, and the Philippines, places where standards of living are rising slowly but steadily, where decade after decade poor people are becoming middle class. In such places, economies are growing, and will continue to grow.

As a result, emissions will continue to grow, too.

It’s all well and good to preach the gospel of renewable energy to the leaders of these countries. We should by all means everyone continue to work to make renewable energy attractive to decision-makers in situations like theirs.

But we shouldn’t be fooled.

For many developing world decision-makers the backbone of the grid will continue to be fossil fuel-based simply because that’s the technology the country is set up for: that’s the technology the personnel at the utility company understands, that’s the technology the existing grid is built for, and technological inertia is strong. A statistically negligeable percentage of people might be persuaded to go vegan, but at the macro level richer people will reliably demand more animal proteins.

Poverty abatement will remain carbon intensive for the forseeable future. Any climate strategy that ignores this reality is dead on arrival.

However much you care about the future of the climate, if you found yourself running Indonesia’s public utility company this afternoon, you’d be overseeing a huge coal burning operation tomorrow, and next week, and next month and next year. You’d have no short-term alternative to the system you inherit, and you probably wouldn’t have access to the financial or technological capital it would take to switch away from it.

Of course, you could take a chance and try. If you messed it up, the lights wouldn’t stay on for long. And once the lights went off, your job wouldn’t stay in your hands for very long either.