“Respect your descendents … Get it done.”

A young woman named Anjali Appadurai representing Earth in Brackets stole the show at COP17 yesterday.

She was the final speaker.

How ironic that the world’s youth, the people who will be most affected by climate change, are relegated to the bottom of the agenda.

The climate refugee controversy (not)

I was trying to find some recent data on climate refugees just now because of the controversy (in some quarters) over inaccurate UN projections (which, it seems, did not emanate from the UN at all). A Wikipedia site is of considerable assistance in this regard in that, while noting the conceptual problems, it does not dismiss the issue of ‘environmental migrants’. I’m reminded of an anonymous quotation on the definition of an economist I came across once, that read something along the lines of ‘someone who sees something in practice as asks whether it works in theory’. Does it really matter if there are 50 million climate refugees in 2010, 2020 or 2030? Is it somehow acceptable if it is an event that occurs 10 or 20 years from now? Or is it less of an issue because we are not sure whether a person can or cannot be counted because it is not possible to prove conclusively whether they were displaced because of environmental factors or war that may or may not have been caused by deteriorating environmental resources?

My challenge to the skeptics would be to watch this movie and then present a convincing argument that displaced persons arising from environmental factors is decreasing or not deviating from any historical trend. Furthermore, maybe if some of the climate change skeptics within government circles could bring themselves to watch it, they would spend less time trying to argue against the science and recognise that, whether they believe in the science or not, the consequences of climate change are sitting on their door step right now in the shape of a ‘national security problem’.

Irene is good news for GDP

As the clean up after Hurricane Irene commences, not too many people will realise that this is actually ‘good for the economy’ — at least in terms of GDP growth. The problem is that all expenditure on goods and services — even if it is cleaning up after a ‘natural’ disaster (sic) — ends up on the plus side of the ledger. Continuing with this logic, it actually makes sense to urge BP to have more oil spills, and to encourage crime because we spend more on burglar alarms. Robert F. Kennedy was making this same point more than four decades ago and yet GDP remains the primary macroeconomic variable shaping government policies around the world (with the notable exception of Bhutan!)

The biggest irony of all, is that even Simon Kuznets, (the man who invented GDP) in his very first report to the US Congress in 1934 went on record as saying: “… the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”, and then again in 1962: “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”

I don’t think Professor Kuznets would have argued in favour of extreme weather events as a means of growing GDP somehow.