Will Wilkinson muses on how to best help out poor countries that are probably going to bear the brunt of the negative effects of climate change, especially in light of a correlation between carbon emissions and GDP growth:

In light of this kind of evidence, policies that would slow growth in incomes and energy use in developing countries would likely also cause avoidable suffering and loss of life. In my opinion, an effective, globally coordinated system regulating carbon emissions is exceedingly unlikely — even if Matt and friends manage to win the culture war over attitudes toward the environment and energy use. Given the relative impotence of voluntary small-beer behavioral changes and the likelihood that ambitious global regulatory approaches will fail, the best hope for future coastal Bengalis and “African” children is for their countries over the next half-century or so to get wealthy enough that floods and droughts will cease to entail much risk of death or disease.

But what if they don’t get wealthy enough. As growth and developmental economists no, growth isn’t inevitable and no one really knows how to promote growth, especially for chronically very-poor countries. After all, for the vast majority of human history, everyone was living in a Malthusian hellscape where any population growth brought on by new technology or health advancements was simply bitten back by disease and resource scarcity. I’m not saying that large swaths of Africa and Bangladesh are quite like that, but simply that we can’t just assume that countries that haven’t gotten much richer in the past 50 years are going to do so in the next 50. In light of that possibility, it seems like having rich countries cut back on their carbon emissions (along with China and India in the future) might be the best idea.