As they did for the previous meeting in Copenhagen, some 200 of the world’s economies came together and did absolutely nothing to halt their global carbon emissions, other than to commit to long-range targets with expiry dates set for a time when most current delegates will no longer be in public office or, for that matter, even be alive.

Economics furnishes a handy remedy to this—put a price on carbon emissions or tax the energy consumption that generates emissions so that emitters will have to pay the costs we’ll all ultimately have to bear as a result of climate change. But for carbon pricing to work, there has to be one global price, and it must be applied universally. Otherwise, emissions will simply migrate to the countries where there are the fewest deterrents.

The US, along with other developed economies like Japan and Canada, argues that it won’t make its industries or consumers pay for carbon emissions if other countries (like China, the world’s largest emitter) don’t do the same.

China responds that climate change doesn’t reflect only today’s emissions but summarizes cumulative emissions from over the last 250 years of global industrialization. On a cumulative basis, calculated since 1751, China’s emissions are still roughly only one third of the US’s.

Nevertheless, it’s the emissions from the rapidly expanding and largely coal-powered Chinese and Indian economies of today that threaten to push current atmospheric CO2 levels over some climatic tipping point.

China counters that its emissions, on a per capita basis, are only one tenth of North America’s. Following this logic, China should be entitled to emit more in order to industrialize sufficiently so that it can emancipate hundreds of millions of its citizens from economic poverty.

China sees attempts to control the growth of its emissions as efforts to limit its rate of economic growth, which in turn reduces the number of people that can be brought out of poverty. But is China’s plan to give hundreds of millions of its rural citizens first-world energy consumption levels ecologically sustainable, or, for that matter, even economically possible, given where oil prices are already trading?

In the absence of carbon pricing, there is one sure-fire way to cap emissions, and that’s to cap growth. What no one wants to acknowledge at the Cancún summit is that economic downturns are bullish for the environment. For example, in the economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country’s energy consumption (and emissions) fell by nearly 30 per cent. During the recent recession, global CO2 emissions fell without any government mandate to that effect and without any meaningful price on carbon emissions.

If the world is serious about tackling global climate change, we need to put a meaningful price ($50–$60 per tonne) on carbon emissions now. If we don’t, our next choice is to forego economic growth.

Coal is still abundant across North America, but outside of a few coal states and the province of Alberta, no one dares build new coal-fired generating plants these days. Coal’s carbon emissions have made it a pariah fuel, at least in this part of the world. And with good reason: coal emits twice as much carbon per unit of energy as natural gas does.

Of course, when we say no to new coal plants, we’re not really saying no to more power generation. Instead, we’re saying, “Let’s burn natural gas or, even better, use renewables like wind to generate power, often at double or more the cost of coal.” (Falling natural gas prices have only recently made it cost-competitive with coal.) And we’re passing those costs along to our own steel and auto-assembly plants.

Unfortunately their competitors overseas are run on the cheap coal-fired power North American plants are increasingly denied. China may lead the world in the production of wind turbines, but eighty per cent of that country’s power comes from burning coal.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me we’ve got our carbon policy ass-backwards. We handicap our industries by forcing them to use more expensive, greener power while they have to compete with imports that are created with much cheaper coal-fired power. And all the while we pretend that we are protecting our economy from crippling carbon costs that would diminish our competitiveness.

But ironically we do the economy more harm than good by not charging for emissions at the same time as we force power users to pay that much more for coal alternatives.

You shouldn’t make domestic industries pay twice. If they are going to fork out more for using less carbon-emitting power, you shouldn’t make them do it again by losing market share to imports that don’t have to pay for their own emissions.

Wouldn’t it be better to put an actual price on emissions instead of just de facto banning new coal plants? By pricing domestic carbon emissions, we could then apply that same cost to imports through a carbon tariff and thereby achieve a level playing field. Instead, by pretending we don’t price carbon when really we do, we saddle our producers with higher energy costs but deny them any commercial benefit from using greener power, which they would get from a carbon tariff.

The status quo is a lose-lose proposition. If we’re going to ban new coal plants, we might as well raise the carbon bar for everyone.

The acquisition of a nine per cent share of the Athabasca tar sands’ marquee Syncrude operation by Sinopec (which is owned by the Chinese government) signals a new willingness on China’s part to sink billions into the future development of high-cost oil from tar sands. It coincides with the granting of a $20 billion soft loan by China to the Chávez regime in Venezuela, which will at least in part be repaid in oil from that country’s Orinoco tar sands.

Unlike Canada, however, Venezuela is not too fussed about whether they will export raw bitumen or processed synthetic oil to their Chinese customers. In Canada, of course, final approval of the Sinopec deal by the country’s Foreign Investment Review Agency hinges at least in part on compliance with Stephen Harper’s pledge not to export raw bitumen to countries with laxer carbon standards than North America’s.

Might I remind Prime Minister Harper that the price for carbon emissions in China today is exactly the same as the price for carbon emissions in both Canada and the United States? When that changes, as it ultimately must, it’s nothing a carbon tariff couldn’t readily handle.

Carbon issues aside, common economic sense dictates that Alberta tar sands producers should start thinking a whole lot more about supplying China either bitumen or processed synthetic oil through a pipeline to the Pacific, and a whole lot less about supplying their traditional market in the United States.

Ninety per cent of every new barrel of oil produced in the world gets burned as transport fuel. If you compare China’s auto sales with America’s sales, it’s not hard to predict where tomorrow’s oil supply will be headed. China’s oil consumption has grown from just over two million barrels per day in the early 1980s to an estimated nine million barrels per day this year. And at the rate that its vehicle market is growing, the country could double its oil consumption over the next decade or so.

By comparison, take a look at where US oil consumption is going. While Chinese car sales are growing explosively, this year there were four million fewer vehicles on the road in America than there were the year before. With triple-digit oil prices just around the corner, you can expect to see another 40 to 50 million American vehicles taking the exit lane over the next decade.

So if you are a tar sands producer, Sinopec or otherwise, which market do you think you should be pursuing? One in which demand has already peaked and now faces irreversible decline, or one where oil consumption per capita is only a tenth of North America’s, but where vehicle sales are growing by 50 per cent a year?

Photo ops for local schmoes trying to make it big on a world stage don’t abate a single ton of carbon going out into the atmosphere, and neither does anything else coming out of that environmental summit. Nor could it, really, when over half the participants, including the most egregious carbon emitter of them all—China—didn’t even want to be there. With energy consumption per capita at a tenth of ours, the only thing that interests countries like China is emitting a whole lot more. That country may lead the world in clean wind power, but it also has more coal plants spewing emissions than the US, UK and Japan combined.

So it’s only natural that people in this part of the world would be skeptical, if not downright cynical, about trying to go down the multilateral path ever again.

But just because North Americans have lost faith in international environmental summits doesn’t mean that environmental—and, in particular, carbon—concerns don’t factor more and more into our economies and our everyday lives.

Try setting up a brand-spanking-new coal-fired power plant, like the 800 China and India will have on the go, and see how far you get in the approval process. With the exception of major coal-producing areas like Wyoming, West Virginia and Alberta, you can’t get new coal-fired facilities licensed anymore, not even in places like Texas, which still get nearly half their power from coal, let alone in holier-than-thou states like California.

Unlike the plethora of platitudes and pontifications that came out of Copenhagen, North American power users put their money where their mouths are. It costs a lot more to generate a kilowatt of electricity from natural gas, or, even more, from running a nuclear power plant, than from burning still-abundant but carbon-dirty coal.

You can stand wherever you want on the global climate change debate. (I’m no climatologist, but it seems to me the recent images of open water in the once-frozen Arctic Ocean are pretty compelling evidence, even if it’ll take another 300 years to melt the Himalayan snow cap.) But whether or not you believe in anthropogenic global warming isn’t really the point.

The point is that we all live in one world, and what’s valid at one end of the world should be valid at the other end. There can’t be ever-more-expensive carbon abatement restrictions on the side of the planet that thinks its emissions are responsible for adverse climate change, while on the other side there’s a doubling in global coal consumption over the next two decades.

If we think global warming is for real, we need to put a price on our own carbon emissions, and slap a carbon tariff on everyone else’s.

Otherwise, why can’t we build coal plants, too?

While it was emissions from the old carbon reprobates like North America and Europe that took us from 280 to 390 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere, it will be the smokestacks of China and India that threaten to drive us to an environmental tipping point.

China already has more coal plants than the US, UK and Japan combined, and over the next twenty years that country and India will account for almost eighty per cent of the expected doubling in global coal consumption.

If these guys aren’t playing by the same carbon rules that we are, it’s game over.

But to the ears of the energy-hungry Chinese and Indian economies, carbon rules sound a lot more like eco-imperialism than environmental sustainability. With per capita energy consumption at a tenth of Western levels, those countries aren’t about to make any voluntary concessions to the environment, and we can’t expect them to.

But what we can do is ensure that when they export products to our markets, they have to play by the same carbon rules that we do.

Otherwise, we can’t expect our own manufacturers and resource producers to pay a double premium to do the right thing: once by writing a check to cover their own emissions, and then a second time by giving up competitiveness to trade rivals that under price them by doing the wrong thing. That’s not environmentalism—just national economic suicide.

A carbon tariff is an indispensable component of any economically viable carbon policy that Western economies must ultimately adopt.

China and India can build all the coal plants they want, but when their manufacturing plants use dirty power to produce goods that are then exported to our market, the emissions embodied in those goods must be taxed at the same rate our domestic producers would pay for their own carbon emissions.

Not only would a leveled playing field ensure popular voter support for putting a price on carbon emission prices in our economy, but it would also start collaring runaway emissions growth in places that really count in the global picture. (Emissions from China’s export sector, for example, comprise a third of that country’s world-leading emissions.)

We don’t need another Kyoto-type protocol in Copenhagen. What we need is to put a price on our own carbon emissions and a carbon tariff on everyone else’s.

I’m Jeff Rubin, and I believe your world is about to get a whole lot smaller.