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Environment Posts

Environment

Twelve Steps to Poverty

World Environment Day on 5 June offers the poor a tempting formula: developing countries must slow economic growth to avoid becoming eco-vampires like the industrialized economies. Its "Twelve Steps to Help You Kick the CO2 Habit" mean we Africans should be content to live quaintly in our mud huts lit by solar and wind power.

Bottoms up to Earth Day

The top-down solutions to environmental problems favoured by the Green movement have failed to protect the environment, and have impoverished millions in the process.

U.N. study says starve the poor

At a time when food prices are rising sharply, the UN's anti-market and anti-technology approach to agriculture will only make food scarcer and drive prices even higher.

What's killing the poor is poverty

There is a growing notion that rich countries should slash imports from poor countries whose antiquated factories are heavy carbon emitters: this eco-protectionism is in fact good old-fashioned protectionism and would hit the poor hardest.

A dose of reality on climate change

Britain’s Department of Health says we face killer heatwaves and the Royal College of Physicians president says "the effects of global warming on health could eclipse those of smoking, alcohol and obesity." But more people in the UK routinely die of cold than of heat. And the cure for so-called tropical diseases is not cool temperatures but prosperity.

Protectionism harms consumers and the environment

Proposals to restrict imports from countries which do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions are simply protectionism. They would decrease world trade, disproportionately harming poorer countries, and favour the status quo by rewarding inefficient producers and thus delaying the adoption of cleaner, resource-saving technologies.

Hot air and human health

The WHO has overstated the health implications of climate change in order to call for strict caps on carbon emissions. By undermining economic growth, this would have very serious consequences for health in developing countries.

Adaptation not emissions cuts is policymakers' best approach

Current climate change talks in Bali are focussing on a "Kyoto-2" with global caps on emissions of greenhouse gases. But such a treaty would harm the poor, hampering their adaptability to climate change, while doing little to prevent it.

Warped policies plant hunger

World Food Day made a few nods towards the need for economic freedoms but did not make clear that hunger is caused by bad policies, not by a shortage of food. These policies range from agricultural restrictions and subsidies to every sort of economic interference by governments and by the lack of property rights. People can feed themselves if they are allowed to.

Pesticides are good for you

Scare stories about the health risks of pesticides often make the headlines with little or no proof, undermining public trust in science and in modern agricultural technologies. But these techologies have ensured the regular delivery of cheap and nutritional food to billions; without them only the rich could afford a healthy life-prolonging diet.