Climate change and the economic crisis

Jeffrey Sachs:

The scarcity of primary commodities and damage from climate change in recent years contributed to the destabilization of the world economy that gave rise to the current crisis.

He also talks about sustainability (twelve times in a one page article), concerted global efforts, public-sector leadership, and public-private partnerships. The whole article looks like the agenda of any European socialist or conservative party.

A question for Ecological Economics and Resilience Science

Margaret Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association of the UK said:

The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases. Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?

Some words and phrases the LGA recommends not using and not even attempting to replace with vernacular synonyms are governance, spatial, innovative capacity, paradigm, and synergies.

How much do people value the environment?

Of the $300 billion U.S. citizens gave to charity in 2007, $7 billion went to the environment/animals and $100 billion to religion.

Dangerous water policies

In a post about the myth of water wars the GEF Blog quotes Tony Allan:

It is a paradox that the water pessimists are wrong but their pessimism is a very useful political tool [...]. The water optimists are right but their optimism is dangerous because the notion enables politicians to treat water as a low policy priority [...].

Quite the opposite - it is when politicians treat water as a high priority when bad things, such as water scarcity, happen.

James Hansen is angry

In The Times:

Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he believed scientists, the people who knew most about climate change, now had a moral obligation to become politically active. He has chosen Coventry to stage Thursday’s protest because it is home to E.ON, the power company that is planning a giant new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent.

“One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions,” he said. “If the government permits the building of new infrastructure which locks us into a future of high CO2 emissions, there is a moral obligation to try to stop them.”

First, the new plant will not destroy the efforts of those citizens. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will forever be lower than would be the case if those citizens had acted differently. Second, a new plant will not lock us into anything. It is up to citizens to decide how much electricity to use no matter how many power stations are built.

Amartya Sen and unfettered capitalism

Amartya Sen believes or pretends to believe that defenders of unfettered capitalism like the current system:

Some defenders of unfettered capitalism [...] resist change [...] Others do, however, see truly serious defects in the existing economic arrangements and want to reform them.

These Nobel laureates...

Missing girls and unaccounted girls

Science magazine has two news items on the "missing girls" of China, where due to selective abortion 120 boys are born for every 100 girls. Science is sympathetic to the idea that "girls are just as precious as boys" in the first of the articles, is sympathetic to men in the second - "Chinese officials are taking measures to encourage couples to value daughters, but they don't talk much about the flip side of the problem: men who can't find wives" -, and then fails to acknowledge the happy flip side of this flip side - women who can now afford to choose better husbands. They don't count for Science.