He's gay...
Posted on 06/24/2006 2:11:03 PM PDT by Torie
Bolton v Gore
Jun 22nd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
A question of priorities: hunger and disease or climate change?
TWO years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards.
That conclusion upset a lot of environmentalists. This week, another man who upsets a lot of people embraced it. John Bolton, America's ambassador to the United Nations, said that Mr Lomborg's “Copenhagen Consensus” (see articles) provided a useful way for the world body to get its priorities straight. Too often at the UN, said Mr Bolton, “everything is a priority”. The secretary-general is charged with carrying out 9,000 mandates, he said, and when you have 9,000 priorities you have none.
So, over the weekend, Mr Bolton sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises. The problems addressed were climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers.
Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last.
The ambassadors thought it wiser to spend money on things they knew would work. Promoting breast-feeding, for example, costs very little and is proven to save lives. It also helps infants grow up stronger and more intelligent, which means they will earn more as adults. Vitamin A supplements cost as little as $1, save lives and stop people from going blind. And so on.
For climate change, the trouble is that though few dispute that it is occurring, no one knows how severe it will be or what damage it will cause. And the proposed solutions are staggeringly expensive. Mr Lomborg reckons that the benefits of implementing the Kyoto protocol would probably outweigh the costs, but not until 2100. This calculation will not please Al Gore. Nipped at the post by George Bush in 2000, Mr Gore calls global warming an “onrushing catastrophe” and argues vigorously that curbing it is the most urgent moral challenge facing mankind.
Mr Lomborg demurs. “We need to realise that there are many inconvenient truths,” he says. But whether he and Mr Bolton can persuade the UN of this remains to be seen. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN's deputy secretary-general, said on June 6th that: “there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda...and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether [it makes] sense or not.”
GO GLOBAL WARMING, GO!!!!
Really. Closing the UN would be cheap and effective.
Making it irrelevant is much more doable. That should be the goal.
Once it is irrelevant, doing away with it should be easier...
Environmentalists are more interested in your money than the environment.
'the proposed solutions are staggeringly expensive'
All of the planets are warming at the same ratio. This warming is caused by activity on the sun. Someone has calculated a price on how much it will cost to turn down the thermostat on the sun? Who figured this out? Al Gore?
"...whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards."
Gee. Ya think? I could've told them that...and I ain't no 'Nobel Laureate,' either. ;)
This rag is from the folks who actually control oil, gas, food ad infinitum and algore just isn't cutting the mustard with them vis-a-vis the American people.
The sun spot versus fossil fuel versus volcano thingie has me all confused. So many say they know, when I suspect nobody does. The political noise has made getting down to what we know and don't know hard to find on this subject on the net. Everybody has an agenda.
I didn't realize that The Economist was such a huge conglomerate. Is it listed on the NYSE?
I hope Bolton was being diplomatic and not purblind when he said this. The UN has one overriding priority: the destruction of the US as a world power.
But they are the tree-sitting pawns. Not the ones getting grant money or adding employees to their office.
Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last.
Surprise, surprise.
The lions share of the 50 billion will come from the US and the beneficiaries will all be third world/communist countries.
Thank God Al Gore is just a madman on the sidelines and not running this country.
This is a very complex issue. The most enlightening web site I've found so far is this one:
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/
Thanks for the link. The headline is that global warming might increase the risk of being offed by a mega asteroid.
There is no way this came out of the Economist. We must be linked to a shadow site.
Right, but don't you dare touch my Gulfstream or my ski vacations in Aspen and Chamonix.
My favorite is the frightening discovery that trees in the northern hemisphere are defoliating rapidly. It seems it has been happening every November for the last several years. Scientist are alarmed!
That does not matter, because the impact on the planet is de minimus. Only a few hundred do that. I hope that helps. Let's move on.
This is a socialist, left-leaning magazine. I think what we are seeing is that the socialist left see Gore as an elitist not in keeping with their agenda. "Global warming" is not a way to get the poor excited enough to revolt.
It is a bit of tack for The Economist isn't it?
Yes, and I think a very enlightening one, also. I think that it shows that the socialist left feel that Gore, etal, hurt their movement. How this plays out will be interesting.
Perhaps The Economist is an honest socialist rag really believing that we should help the poor to a better life?
Brilliant!
The rag isn't socialist, Omaha, in any sense of the word as commonly used, except perhaps by some on this site. How if Mr. Buffet doing these days?
My ex-father-in-law is a very conservative New-Englander (living in CT but raised in rural PA). I often wondered where he got some of his off-the-wall views. One day while visiting, I noticed that he had a subscription to the Economist. I explained to him the roots of the magizine and he was shocked. The Economist does a very good job of presenting their agenda without the readers actually understanding what how their minds are being influenced. They are the masters of propaganda.
Re science and political noise; Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt gave me a fine clue with Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. A bit later a bunch of deep thinkers piled on with The Flight from Science and Reason, the proceedings of a NYAS conference of the same title.
Of course. It has been irrefutably documented numerous times over the past thirty years that "environmentalism" is nothing more than a front for the global socialists.
So, you're from the "do as I say, not as I do school". That is certainly exemplary leadership, the type that most people naturally want to follow.
He's gay...
Yes, the rich are different from you and I. They have more money. No, that little bon mot is not original with me. Do you know who wrote that?
Oh, yes, these are priorities for countries whose people are starving and dying of aids, and whose lands, stripped of natural resouces, await the encroaching desert.
Give us something! Stave off our hunger!
If only the good Ambassador had asked how we might help those poor unfortunate souls to help themselves.
Brilliant move by Bolton. Focus on the extreme cost vs unclear benefits of the shady "global warming" wealth-and-power-grab vis a vis other easily understandable and relatively affordable issues. Ranking priorities has a way of getting the arguments out of the fog (as you said).
Which one!?!?!?
Sorry. Progressive Liberalist. I was being overly simplistic and therefore misleading. Do you agree with their agenda? I say agenda, because they openly admit that they are pushing an agenda.
Buffet has come and gone, again. The CWS has come and gone again. Much better last year with Nebraska and the UofF in it!
Well I agree with some of it, and disagree with some of it, and disagreed with their environmental fixation (eg Kyoto), now revised and extended. I certainly disagree with its opinion about Iraq, but then I have this thing about mass killers which have control of a state to facilitate their aims at their disposal, which fixates me. I can't help it. I want them all killed. Maybe I need therapy.
That is what is wonderful about social liberalism. It contains features that we can agree with. However, I found as with my father-in-law that if the reader is continually exposed to magazines such as The Ecomist along with Newsweek, Time, etal, his view changes over time from conservative to liberal. Even his wife was getting on to him about some of his views. The ultimate was when she started quoting from RL's daily radio shows!
I find that if you write the initials "SH" on the target when you go to the range it helps.
I thought he is engaged to Nicolette Sheridan - a former girlfriend of his. I still cannot stand to hear his singing!!!
Bookmarking. I have to go eat some elk tenderloin, but peeked in: first saw a good usage of the word purblind, then so entertained by your conversation, I hope you will keep it up for some good late night reading. Best thread in a long time.
The only lawyer's I have known that invested their client's money was invested in the lawyer's account. :-)
Seriously, how as a lawyer, did you manage other peoples accounts?
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