Here's a recent column I wrote for our local paper inspired, in part, by an article (may require subscription) by Pielke and Daniel Sarewitz in the January 17 New Republic.

Bozeman’s extended spell of vernal temperatures spurs thoughts of global warming. The preponderance of scientific evidence shows that for whatever reasons (human-induced carbon emissions, natural climatic variation), average global temperatures are increasing. The important question is: What do we do about it?

The most common arguments revolve around reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. But this reduction harms the least well off. The money and resources spent on marginal reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would do far more to protect and save human lives if directed toward Third World economic and technological development.

In 1999, Yale economists William Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer estimated the net global cost of the Kyoto Protocol at $716 billion. By comparison (http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/), for less than $50 billion we could greatly reduce malnutrition and control malaria in the developing world. Kyoto enthusiasts retort that the Protocol is just a first step in establishing a framework for future emission reductions. In the meantime, those most vulnerable to drastic climatic events, the world’s poor, will not be any better protected by the developed world’s collective penance.

As Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke describe it in a January 17 New Republic article, “Prescribing emissions reductions to forestall the future effects of disasters is like telling someone who is sedentary, obese, and alcoholic that the best way to improve his health is to wear a seat belt.”

But the radical Greens of the left reject economic progress. They hate free-market capitalism and fear the individual freedom, prosperity, and technological success such a system creates. Never mind that the wealth fostered by free markets funds such environmental fundamentalists -- and real environmental improvements.

The Green fundamentalist position reminds me of the last century’s disastrous experiments in central planning. They see human nature as malleable, a project for socially engineered “improvement.” This implies an underlying contempt for humanity. No longer do individuals possess inherent value; they are disposable to further “the cause.”

For example, Neo-Luddite environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale advocates a return to a more primitive way of life: “Tribes have long-established practices to keep themselves harmonious and stable, including the practice of birth control.... You can call it infanticide if you like; they would understand it as birth control, appropriate to their regard for nature.” For botanist Sandra Knapp, “Our species was (and still is!) an invasive mammalian weed.” Ecologist William Rees sees humans as “the most voracious predators in the world’s oceans and, simultaneously, the most successful terrestrial carnivore ever to have walked the Earth....” In a 1990 academic journal article, anthropologist Warren Hern described “the similarity of the human species to a cancerous process” and declared, “The human species is a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic species.” (In plain English: Evil, destructive humans consume everything in sight.) No wonder, then, the Greens’ hostility to human progress.

At the global scale this attitude manifests in (further) inhuman policies from the U.N. Sarewitz and Pielke report that the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change “refused to fund disaster preparedness efforts at its last conference in December unless states could demonstrate exactly how the disasters they feared were linked to climate change.” Concern for a phenomenon with ill-defined effects trumps human lives.

A more humanitarian policy toward climate change would seek to lift up the world’s poor, helping them build the resources and resilience to withstand drastic weather events. Education (particularly for females), clean drinking water, better nutrition and medical services, and a modernized infrastructure would alleviate some symptoms of underdevelopment. But the sustained growth and long-term well-being of the poorest countries requires political and institutional reform.

Corruption, confiscatory taxation, predatory bureaucracies, lawlessness, forbidding ownership of the fruits of one’s labor, civil wars, and our own trade barriers -- these are the real obstacles to Third World development.

A few essentials are required for progress: a rational, independent, codified legal system; the right to own private property; and at least relatively free markets. Transfers by wealthy countries usually buy Mercedes, monuments, and machine guns for despots, not better lives for the people.

If we want to protect the world’s least fortunate from the effects of climate change, our efforts and resources are better spent improving their economic opportunities than in chasing hot air.