Global Crises, Global Solutions
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A unique publication exploring the opportunities for addressing ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today : climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, access to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, and subsidies and trade barriers. In a world fraught with problems and challenges, we need to gauge how to achieve the greatest good with our money. Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a set of arguments and data for prioritising our response most effectively. Each problem is introduced by a world-renowned expert who defines the scale of the problem and describes the costs and benefits of a range of policy options to improve the situation. Debate is encouraged through the addition of two sets of alternative perspectives' for each proposal, each also written by an internationally recognised expert. The complete set of policy proposals is evaluated by eight of the world's top economists - including three Nobel Laureates - from North America, Europe and China, who attempt a ranking of the most promising options. Whether you agree or disagree with the analysis or conclusions, Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a serious, yet accessible, springboard for debate and discussion.
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Will Podmore (willp@bso.ac.uk), A reviewer, November 29, 2004,
Useful survey of the state of the world's nations
Any warming of the earth from manmade emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will probably be modest, most likely rising by 2 to 2.5 degrees centigrade over the 21st century (according to the UN Climate Panel). The Climate Panel says that it will not reduce food production or increase the number or intensity of hurricanes. This is hardly the most important problem for any of the world's nations. Nature and humanity will easily adjust to it. There is only one valid measure of the overall state of the environment: average life expectancy. By this standard, the environment has been improving for a century. More humans are healthier than they have ever been. The biggest improvement in life expectancy of the last 50 years was achieved by revolutionary China, as average lifespan rose from 30 to 70 years for 1.2 billion people. The second biggest improvement was by independent India, freed at last from the massive famines characteristic of the centuries of British rule. The most significant manmade worsening of life expectancy, five fewer years on average, happened in post-counter-revolutionary Russia. In Britain our life expectancies continue to rise. There are huge problems facing the world's nations: every year, ten million children under the age of five die of preventable diseases. 1.1 billion people still have no clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion have no access to sanitation, causing two million deaths a year and 500 million severe illnesses. The more spent on measures against global warming, the less is spent on more immediately vital matters, such as access to clean drinking water. Britain, like every other nation, needs an integrated plan, using renewables, coal, nuclear energy, oil and gas. We cannot leave development to the anarchy of capitalism, where power companies indulge in an EU-driven feeding frenzy of competition, acquisition, merger and destruction. Foreign ownership of Britain's utilities means minimum investment, maximum export of profits. The essential work of refurbishing the national grid will cost an estimated £10 billion - where's the investment going to come from? Foreign utility companies? So cutting carbon emissions is not the best way to achieve progress. It would be costly, yet ineffective. For example, it is estimated that implementing the Kyoto agreement would cost $1 trillion, and it would only cut a tiny slice off the temperature rise. Technological and scientific advances are part of the solution to real problems. GM foods and pesticides, for example, have hugely increased yields of fruit and vegetables. Nobody has ever died from eating GM foods, or developed cancer from the legal application of pesticides. Banning GM foods and pesticides would reduce yields of fruit and vegetables, making them dearer and diets worse, reducing life expectancy. Britain is not about to run out of hydrocarbons. Clean coal technology, in which Britain was a world leader, was abandoned at privatisation, when the capitalist class closed down so many of our pits. So last year, we produced 28 million tons of coal, but imported 32 million tons. We need to reopen viable mines. We need to reassess the reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea and off the West coast of Scotland. We were self-sufficient in energy until just recently. One projection is that by 2020 we will be relying on imported gas for 80% of our energy needs. We can be self-sufficient again, and we need to be, if we are to be an independent sovereign country. Otherwise we would be subject at any time to pressure or blackmail. Supplies could be switched off at any time should relations with the producer country change. Some see all problems as supranational, requiring supranational solutions, worldwide action through intrusive international agreements like Kyoto, with cartoon cries to 'save the world' through pre-emptive actions. They revive the anarchist slogan 'No states, no borders', mirroring the capitalist agenda of 'globalisation'. Human innovation is the ultimate resource. Workers are wonderfully creative. The Greens, with their contempt for productive forces, line up with the anti-industry parson Malthus against the pro-industry Marx. The working class cannot conduct its present policy on the basis of scares about a possible future ice age in 50,000 years.
Also recommended: The skeptical environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg
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