Air pollution regulators in the San Francisco Bay area voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve new rules that impose fees on businesses for emitting greenhouse gasses.
May 2008
The pain caused by the global food crisis has led many people to belatedly realize that we have prioritized growing crops to feed cars instead of people. That is only a small part of the real problem.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
After reading "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today, it's clear that he hasn't digested the "people are bad" global warming alarmism memo. Explaining the "Copenhagen Consensus" economic analysis, he gives examples of how other investments could do more to address pressing problems in the world other than global warming:
Heart disease represents more than a quarter of the death toll in poor countries. Developed nations treat acute heart attacks with inexpensive drugs. Spending $200 million getting these cheap drugs to poor countries would avert 300,000 deaths in a year.
Poor water or sanitation affects more than two billion people and will claim millions of lives this year. One targeted solution would be to build large, multipurpose dams in Africa.
Building new dams may not be politically correct, but there are massive differences between the U.S. and Europe – where there are sound environmental arguments to halt the construction of large dams and even to decommission some – and countries like Ethiopia which have no water storage facilities, great variability in rainfall, and where dams could be built with relatively few environmental side effects. A single reservoir located in the scarcely inhabited Blue Nile gorge in Ethiopia would cost a breathtaking $3.3 billion. But it would produce large amounts of desperately needed power for Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, combat the regional water shortage in times of drought, and expand irrigation. All these benefits would be at least two-and-a-half times as high as the costs.
In each of these areas – and in the areas of air pollution, education and trade barriers – the world's scarce resources could be used to achieve massive amounts of benefits.
If Lomborg is trying to get his message across to the likes of Sierra Club members, he is missing the point, as saving lives is the problem in their eyes:
What We Should Do
Stabilizing population growth worldwide and reducing excessive fuel consumption in the U.S. and other industrialized nations are vital components of slowing, and eventually stopping, global warming. When women have access to education, economic opportunities, family planning and reproductive health services, they have fewer children and increase the spacing between each child. Getting a handle on population growth at home and abroad, and helping low-income nations develop cleanly, are vital steps toward a cleaner, more sustainable future….
Tell our leaders to increase funds for family planning and reproductive health projects at home and abroad, as well as for women's empowerment projects.
The President of the Czech Republic, that is. President Vaclav Klaus is probably the soundest Head of State in Europe, a good friend to the United States and a former professor of economics, which means he gives short shrift to environmental alarmism.
So little, in fact, that he has written a book on the subject, "Blue Planet in Green Shackles," that he will be launching in English at the National Press Club next Wednesday. CEI was honored to be chosen by the President to publish the book.
In the book, Klaus writes: "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
The luncheon begins promptly at 12:30 p.m. in the Ballroom at the National Press Club, on the 13th floor of the National Press Building at 14th and F Streets NW in Washington DC. Remarks start at 1 p.m., followed by a question-and-answer session. For advance ticket reservations, call (202) 662-7501, or email reservations@press.org. Admission is $16 for National Press Club members, $28 for NPC guests, and $35 for general admission.
Everyone who attends will be given a complimentary copy of the book, and President Klaus will be staying on to sign copies for those who would like it.
A preventive war worked out so well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another. The new preventive war — the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat — has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming.
Prague- Czech President Vaclav Klaus will visit the United States next week and meet Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Edwin Feulner, head of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, in Washington. During his four-day visit, Klaus will promote his book Blue, Not Green Planet, campaigning against what he calls "climate alarmism." Klaus, who is sceptical of the global warming theory, has been engaged in the global discussion on the climate for a long time.
In an article by Thomas Friedman article in today’s New York Times, Mr Hot Flat and Crowded says:
“It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”
Actually, what baffles me is that the President has to go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months to beg the Saudi king for an oil price break when Congress could easily give the consumers one by lifting its restrictions on Americans exploiting their very own resources that currently lie out of bounds in ANWR, the Rockies and the Outer Continental Shelf, behind legislative lock and key with a regulatory sign on them saying "Beware of the leopard."
As for Gal Luft's laughably overblown comments about the Saudis buying up Apple, see my paper from a few months back:
“Non-Terrorist Use of Petrodollars. Overseas acquisitions from the Arab world in 2007 amounted to a mere $68 billion. Middle Eastern individuals and companies own a total of $8 billion of U.S. direct investment, less than that owned by tiny Belgium, at $10 billion. But even if the numbers were bigger, there is no fire in this alarm.
Foreign investment raises labor productivity, income, and employment. Workers are better off with more capital rather than with less, and are usually indifferent to the investor’s nationality. Middle Eastern investment increases capital in its recipient countries, which directly increases labor productivity and GDP. Because about two-thirds of GDP goes to labor as wages, salaries, and fringe benefits, rising output means higher wages or more employment. In essence, the Arabs are using our petrodollars for our benefit as much as theirs. Foreigners, never mind Arabs, continue to own a negligible amount of American capital, so fears of an “Arab takeover” are overblown.”
Let's face it, given the amount of oil wealth sitting in Alberta, we should be worried about Canada buying us up!
Shock and awe — we are living it! We stand, mouth agape, staring at the pump — at $4 gallons and fast-emptying pocketbooks. Even worse, with crude oil already costing more than $120 a barrel, many predict this wave has yet to crest.
Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place. Politicians and much of the public lose sight of the unavoidable fact that for every created benefit, there's also a created cost or, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman said, "There's no free lunch."
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, who says that global warming "demands aggressive action," last week signed an agreement with the United Kingdom "to share experiences and strategies" in the fight against rising temperatures. Given the diffuse language of the agreement, it would be easy to dismiss Doyle's climate diplomacy as a stunt, but there is in fact a great deal that Wisconsin can learn from Britain.
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