Teach a Man to Fish

If we really cared about the planet the best thing we could do for it in the short run would be to help a few billion people help themselves. It wouldn’t even necessarily cost us anything. All we really need do is dismantle the bone headed subsidies and protective tariffs we maintain for our agriculture sector. That alone would help lift heaven knows how many of the world’s desperately poor out of the squalor that produces so much pollution. Most of these people live in agrarian societies. If we opened up our markets to them their incomes would rise faster and they would have more to spend on things like education and nutrition programs, and on goods and services from people like us. More of their children would survive to adulthood with better health and higher IQ’s, and with the wealth to demand cleaner surroundings. We would feed and clothe ourselves more cheaply and have more money to spend on other things, including pollution controls. The only people to lose are an ever shrinking class of farmers and ag companies, many of whom don’t need help. If they are so addicted to the government trough they can’t survive without it then give them the damn money, just don’t tie it to artificially high prices. We will all be better off.

Yes, all these people will opt for the automobiles and air conditioners that come with the modern world. They are doing that now and without catalytic converters for their cars or pollution scrubbers for their smokestacks. They will add those when they can afford them for the same reason we did; to get rid of the smog. In the meantime we can be investing in R&D for cleaner energy options. The third world will buy the technology for those too when it is available at a reasonable price. They will also be better able to cope with the effects of global warming if it comes, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if that turns out to be a significant contributor. The question is when? I say the sooner the better and we can help speed the process.

All this is probably going to happen regardless of what we do. The top two Millennium Development Goals at the World Bank are: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and 2. Achieve universal primary education. The bank expects the poverty rate to be cut in half by 2015 from 1990 levels. Literacy rates are going up dramatically around the globe. Child mortality is down. Nutrition is up. Emerging economies are growing at about 6% per year. That may slow in a prolonged recession but it represents a doubling every 12 years, the fastest in recorded history. The world is becoming a better place to live for a lot of its people but despite all this progress there were still 1.4 billion people living on less that $1 a day as recently as 2005. They can do better and we can help them.

Yet here we are pouring subsidized ethanol into our tanks to reduce gas mileage. We allow fast track negotiating authority to expire effectively ensuring the failure of the latest round of world trade talks, which might have been a shot in the arm for a global economy now in a tail spin. Congress easily overrides a presidential veto on a massive farm bill to keep prices high on favored commodities for another five years. To the degree we talk about the environment at all we spend our energy protecting beaches and arctic wilderness areas that are in no danger. And we propose carbon taxes to reduce CO2 emissions. Scientists for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel most often cited as the authority on global warming, say no conceivable reductions will have much effect in this century. New taxes will certainly suppress economic progress that would allow us to better deal with it. We can do better than this.