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.