The World Bank reports that over the past three years global food prices have nearly doubled. I see three primary reasons, and greed isn’t one of them. First, as populations grow and people become wealthier, they change their diet. They demand not only staples, but also now regularly eat once out-of-reach luxuries like meat, dairy, […]
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Here’s why we should be worried about running out of fresh water—in most places around the world it’s free—priced at zero. Any resource priced at zero will be wasted. Environmental and social problems follow. Here’s one example. The Ogallala Aquifer underlies 225,000 square miles in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. Use of […]
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I’m evermore skeptical of the policy prescriptions demanded by those convinced climate change threatens civilization. Al Gore, the leader of this pack, asserts that if we do not act “within 10 years” (to reduce CO2 emissions) we are likely to reach a “tipping point” making it impossible “to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability.” […]
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Here’s some good news worth sharing. It’s from a paper by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer. “The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5,400 in 1980 to $8,500 in 2005. Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just as fast. […]
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Two thirds of the world’s poorest countries are in Africa. It’s home to 34 of the 35 states with the lowest life expectancy. More than 300 million people survive there on less than a dollar a day. (This figure has gone up by around 100 million over the last 10 years.) All this despite the […]
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Last week the price of a barrel of oil hit $100. This raised fears of an economic slowdown akin to the one in the 1970s when oil prices quadrupled almost overnight. That shock was largely responsible for the worst decade of global economic performance since the Great Depression. Today, however, the world is a much […]
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Last week at the UN’s global warming meeting in Indonesia, polar bear costumed activists passed out huge pieces of cake. They were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions. I wonder if they understand how their obsessive focus on Kyoto as the “only solution” hinders progress? […]
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Geoengineering solutions to global warming are receiving ever more attention, and for good reason. Science reported that top U.S. climate scientists gathered at Harvard this month to explore ways geoengineering might lower the global temperature. Mimicking the natural cooling effects of volcanic eruptions by releasing massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere is one idea. […]
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Congratulations to Al Gore on winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. Mr. Gore asserts climate change is a moral and spiritual issue. In order to make responsible decisions on these dimensions, Mr. Gore’s next mission should be to focus on the tradeoffs his policy choices necessarily imply. I suggest when […]
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The Annual Energy Forum recently hosted by MSU outlined the challenges of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere while supplying the energy people demand at prices they’re willing to pay. I came away convinced that geoengineering, i.e., the deliberate modification of the Earth’s environment, will receive ever more attention as the steep and unavoidable costs […]
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