Better Ideas for the Planet

Count me among the skeptics but let’s assume for the moment global warming is a fact, principally caused by human activity. The question is what to do about it. If you subscribe to the notion we should revert to a pre-industrial society, live in self sustaining communities without global trade or travel, happily riding bicycles to work, you can stop reading. The sixteenth century was not a pleasant time to live for most people, and they didn’t have bicycles. I will take an opposing view; a clean environment is desirable primarily to make the world a more hospitable place to live for its people. That means more of us must be more prosperous, better able to take advantage of the benefits modern goods and services can offer, and better equipped to clean up after ourselves.

There is a lot we could do. Brown clouds over Asia are back in the news today, but they are new only to Asia. They were once the order of the day in the west too. In much of early eighteenth century England the air was unfit to breath. I remember when my family heated our house with a coal fireplace. At least we had a chimney but soot was everywhere. That stuff was filthy. We still generate most of our electricity from coal but the haze is nothing like it was then, and nothing like it is in Asia now. It can be cleaned up. I would argue that as Asians become more prosperous they will do just that.

Dirty as it is coal is cleaner than wood, at least when it burns, but in the third world many families still cook with poorly ventilated indoor wood stoves. They generate a lot of carbon monoxide and particulate matter, a major source of respiratory infection. Just remember the last time you were in a room with an open fire. Didn’t your clothes smell afterwards? It’s not especially good for your lungs either. WHO estimates that cooking with not so green solid biomass fuels such as wood or dung contributes to a level of indoor pollution responsible for “2.7% of the global burden of disease.” That translates to a lot of deaths, especially among malnourished children. WHO’s recommendation; switch to kerosene or liquid petroleum gas. But the world’s poor can’t afford even kerosene. I submit they would do anything they possibly could to help a sick child stop coughing. A small increase in income levels would work wonders. Raising the price of kerosene would condemn those children for who knows how many more generations.

That’s what we are proposing with Kyoto style protocols to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; raise the price of precious fuels for rich and poor alike. For the latter it is more than an inconvenience. It can be a death sentence. Do we really expect countries like India to go along? It’s a terrible idea and there are better ways. I’m not suggesting the air needs to be cleaned up only in the third world. We have a way to go ourselves, but if global warming is a problem it is a global one. We can’t solve it by ourselves and we can’t expect people currently living in poverty to be satisfied with their lot. We must have solutions that allow them a route to prosperity. They will settle for nothing less.

There are solutions at hand. Some of them don’t cost very much. Some, like reduced trade barriers, have net economic benefits all around. Look at the Copenhagen Consensus web site. They’ve assembled a group of more than 50 prominent economists, including 5 Nobel Laureates, to rank cost effective approaches to the world’s most serious environmental issues. At the top of the list is a simple nutrition program. Trade is second. More R&D into zero and low carbon fuels is 14^th of 30. It’s a thought provoking list from a very thoughtful group. Before we go spending trillions on CO2 reduction programs that don’t promise much benefit, we might consider some of these ideas.