Just a couple of days after posting about climate change, I ran across this talk by Bjørn Lomborg, in the form of a TEDTalks podcast. It was one of those serendipitous discoveries, as Lomborg was the primary target of The New York Reveiw of Books article that criticizes those who downplay concerns over climate change.

Lomborg basically challenges the increasingly popular perception that climate change should be the primary focus for our efforts to improve the world. His argument is intriguing, advocating that we create a list of all of the world's problems, define specific actionable steps for solving those problems, and prioritize the list based on where efforts will have the most significant impact. He's suggesting that we focus on implementing easy solutions rather than worry about tackling the biggest problems. This all comes across as a breath of fresh air in the climate change debate. Finally, someone is advocating a hard-nosed, realistic approach to the problem--except, wait a minute, what is Lomborg's conclusion? Basically, we are to forget about global warming because that's too big a problem with no easy solution. There are better ways to spend our money.

And what there to argue with? The four priority actions we should concentrate on first are HIV/AIDs prevention, reducing worldwide malnutrition, global access to free markets, and malaria prevention. These are singled out based on the relatively low-cost solutions that will result in the greatest levels of improvement. This should make perfect sense, except why am I so creeped out by it? Does it really make sense to apply a personal productivity approach to solving the world's problems?

I guess my biggest beef is that Lomborg presumes that solving global problems is a zero sum game--each solution is drawing from some limited pool of funds. This might be true to some extent, but when one hears of the vast sums of money being spent every day in a California-sized patch of desert, it seems that there are plenty of untapped funds available for all of the good causes further down Lomborg's priority list.

Posted by ksmoker at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(This post is dedicated to dad.)

In my mailbox this month, I received a National Geographic containing several pages dedicated the search for strategies to reduce the man-made carbon emissions that have been identified as playing a key role in the our warming climate. Then a week later, The New York Review of Books arrived, which included a review of two books challenging the feasibility of reducing carbon emissions.

There is consensus now, even among scientists that editorialize in the Wall Street Journal, that the planet is getting warmer, that this is due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that human beings have contributed greatly to this increase. The question is what do we do about it? Or more to the point, what can we do about it? Over the last decade, it's become clear that the “cap and trade” approach of the Kyoto Protocol is not feasible from either a political or practical point of view.

Luckily, several technological advances and innovations have been developed in the decade since Kyoto, resulting an array of solutions (pdf) for slowing the rate of carbon transfer into the atmosphere. So why do environmentalists like Al Gore the climate change naysayers focus on the decade-old Kyoto style approach as the main point of contention? Because it makes for good partisan bickering and divisive politicking, that's why.

While this confrontation may get politicians elected, it does nothing to actually reduce global warming. When the conversation devolves to this level, the status quo wins over common sense. This is how we find otherwise ardent environmentalists opposing windmills (I'm looking at you Robert F. Kennedy). This is also how the ethanol bandwagon got launched, even though corn-based ethanol provides little benefit over fossil-fuel (thanks also in no small part to the small sugar lobby who block the import of cheap, more efficiently produced ethanol).

Hopefully, we're beginning to come around. Maybe if we focus on the big picture, we might see that our current choices (like, oh, maybe fighting a prolonged war over the control and stability of an oil-rich country) are actually having a detrimental effect on the one issue that unites all of humanity: the long-term, continued health and habitability of our planet.

Posted by ksmoker at 9:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)