Poverty and Hunger Archives

Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country nearly twice the size of Texas. But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them.

“The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That's an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.

"During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.”

In this study Norton reports:

while population growth has no discernible negative effect on the environmental measurements, better economic institutions—more economic freedom or greater rule of law—lead to positive environmental effects. Better economic institutions reduce deforestation and water pollution and enhance net savings and agricultural productivity. Economic freedom tends to have a stronger effect overall, but the rule of law plays an important role in reducing deforestation and water pollution. . . .

. . . nations adopting growthenhancing reforms such as better protection of property rights and acceptance of the rule of law will improve people’s lives. These reforms directly decrease human poverty and environmental degradation and enhance the environment, improving conditions even in realms where population growth has little effect.

Goklany notes that current evidence does not sustain the notion that climate change is the greatest threat to public health or the environment today. His study shows that diverting scarce resources towards feeble and ineffectual mitigation strategies such as the Kyoto treaty would hurt our abilities to respond to any future environmental challenges. Specifically, he shows that a completely successful Kyoto Protocol, despite costing $125 billion annually, would have negligible positive effects on global agriculture production, malaria, water resources, global forest area, or costal wetlands. The study notes that, at best, Kyoto might reduce sea level rise by 1.4 inches (!) by 2080. Goklany concludes that spending scarce resources directly on addressing today’s urgent public health and environmental threats, and advancing economic development, would not only solve today's urgent problems but it would also advance the ability to solve any environmental problems that might occur tomorrow, including climate change.

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.