by Chris Bertram on December 12, 2004
Further to “my post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002982.html on Lomborg below, here’s an idea. Maybe it isn’t new, but I’d still be grateful for critical comment. Lomborg says that it would be better to direct our resources to helping the world’s poor, rather than trying to implement Kyoto. Well, one thing first-world governments could do would be to introduce taxes on carbon emissions (many already have these) and to hypothecate those taxes (or some fixed proportion of them) to foreign-development aid.[1]
fn1. I take it that those who think that foreign aid is always a waste of money or counterproductive would not, themselves, put the Lomborg argument in good faith (whatever their opinions on CO2 and global warming). No need for them to comment below then.
by Chris Bertram on December 12, 2004
Bjorn Lomborg has “a column in today’s Sunday Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/12/do1202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/12/12/ixopinion.html arguing that it would be much better to spend money on helping the world’s poor than on Kyoto-style measures to cut carbon emissions. It is an interesting way of putting things, especially since, as he points out, the world’s poor are likely to be the principal victims of climate change. Thank goodness, then, that those governments most sceptical about Kyoto are also “among the most generous with their foreign-aid budgets”:http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp (scroll down for table). And shame on those Kyoto-enthusiasts who are, comparatively, so mean with their foreign-aid contributions (and who also tie what little aid they do give to compliance with their foreign-policy objectives).
by John Holbo on October 18, 2004
UPDATE: Apparently it’s a dud. In fact, John Quiggin defused it last month. Well, that’s a bit silly not to read my very own weblog. (I knew it was a bit suspicious, what with it being good news and all. What a world, what a world.)
I’ll tuck what now looks to be nonsense under the fold, for the curious. Comments are quite interesting below. And Tim Lambert has an interesting post up in response to the general question. Turns out this is a newer model than Quiggin discussed before.
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by Chris Bertram on September 12, 2004
The New York TImes has a “horrific report on the extent of pollution in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/international/asia/12china.html?hp and on the people who are bearing the costs of growth:
bq. Less than a mile downstream from the waste outlet, Wang Haiqing watched his seven goats chew on weeds. Mr. Wang lived on the other side of the stream, in Wangguo, and said several neighbors had contracted cancer or other intestinal ailments. He said his goats vomited if they drank from the blackened water.
bq. To reach clean drinking water, he said villagers must dig wells 130 feet deep. Most cannot afford to do so.
bq. “It’s been so polluted by the MSG factory,” said Mr. Wang, 60. “It tastes metallic even after you boil it and skim the stuff off it. But it’s the only water we have to drink and to use for cooking.”
by John Q on August 26, 2004
As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit[1]. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.
Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).
Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.
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by John Q on August 25, 2004
Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, Steven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick‘ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues[1].
This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Aussie computer scientist Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.
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by Chris Bertram on August 11, 2004
From Mark Lynas’s “new blog on climate change”:http://www.marklynas.org/blog/ (hat-tip “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/08/11/important_new_blog_about_climate_change.php ) comes “this story”:http://www.iht.com/articles/531250.htm of the medieval village of “Heuersdorf”:http://www.heuersdorf.de/English1.html , in eastern Germany, which is threatened by strip-mining for lignite. God knows why anyone should mine dirty, horrible, acid-rain producing brown coal anyway, let alone demolish medieval churches to do so. This story needs wider circulation.
by Chris Bertram on August 8, 2004
It seems that Prozac is “being prescribed so widely in the UK”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3545684.stm that there’s a buildup in our drinking water:
bq. Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed.
bq. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.
See also “The Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1278760,00.html.
by Kieran Healy on June 23, 2004
There’s an “interesting article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/science/22side.html?8hpib in the _New York Times_ today about “Elizabeth Willott’s”:http://research.biology.arizona.edu/mosquito/willott.html work on mosquitos and the environmental ethics of wetland restoration. Elizabeth’s in the Entomology department at “Arizona”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/. Her other half is the philosopher “Dave Schmidtz”:http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~phil/faculty/dschmidtz.htm, and when Arizona were recruiting “Laurie”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul and me, we stayed with them. It was the middle of December. The first morning we were there, we picked a grapefruit from one of the trees in their yard and ate it for breakfast. This effective recruitment strategy is not often used by universities on the east coast, for some reason.
by John Q on June 6, 2004
If you take the problem of climate change at all seriously, it’s obviously necessary to consider what, if any, role nuclear (fission) energy should play in a response. I discussed this on my blog not long ago and concluded that “it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.” However, on the basis of my rather limited survey of the evidence, I suggested that, as a source of electricity, nuclear energy is about twice as expensive as coal or gas. If so, conservation is the first choice, and we should only move to alternative sources of electricity when the easy conservation options are exhausted.
By contrast, Mark Kleiman says that “Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner”, Brad DeLong says “He’s 100% completely correct”, and Matt Yglesias takes a similar view.
Kleiman cites the example of France, which I don’t find entirely convincing, since the French have always given substantial subsidies to nuclear energy. He argues that the US made a mess of nuclear energy for regulatory reasons, but doesn’t say anything about the British experience, which didn’t have the same problems and was still an economic disaster. I’ve looked briefly at Canada’s CANDU program, where experience appears to be mixed at best.
Can anyone point me to a reliable source of comparative information on this? Is there general agreement, or a partisan divide between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates ? I’d also be interested in comments on the general question raised in my opening sentence.
by John Q on June 4, 2004
How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?
* A major improvement in health in poor countries, saving millions of lives each year
* Substantial progress in reducing the rate of climate change, preventing large-scale species extinctions and other environmental damage
* New and improved advertisements for consumer goods
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by John Q on June 3, 2004
The results of the Copenhagen Consensus are out, and as predicted, that is, with climate change at the bottom of the list. I’ll give a more detailed response later on, but I thought I’d respond to this point in the Economist
The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto.
These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.
On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable[1], as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.
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by Henry Farrell on May 25, 2004
I’m in Europe at the moment for research, and staying with friends in Brussels while I do academic interviews with political types. The place I’m in has a nice big back garden (property is relatively cheap here) which is periodically invaded by flocks of wild green parrots that have gone native. It’s delightful – a splash of the exotic in a notoriously unexotic city. Apparently though, many of the locals are unimpressed – the parrots build big, ugly communal nests resembling poorly built rafts that are a bit of an eyesore in winter, when the leaves drop off the trees. How the parrots themselves make it through the winter, I don’t know. According to the “National Geographic”:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0407_030407_parakeets.html, Brussels isn’t the only city in temperate climes to support a wild parrot population; there are thriving flocks in London, San Francisco and elsewhere.
by John Q on May 24, 2004
I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.
There are however, two big difficulties.
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