I heard about the conference today in an e-mail from Robert J. Walker, the president of the Washington-based Population Institute, which is excerpted below as a “Your Dot” offering.
Not surprisingly, the conference was attacked in advance by groups opposing contraception and abortion. In its newsletter, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute charged that the Gates goal is to build a multi-billion-dollar war chest for programs that would take away, through “population control,” a woman’s right to have babies. In its piece, the group noted, “Even Amnesty International fears the campaign will ‘return to coercive family planning programs.’”
Contraceptive information and services – ‘family planning’ – form an essential part of the health services that women need throughout their lives.
The group dismisses the idea that there is substantial “unmet need” for family planning among women in many poor countries with the same definitiveness used by folks proclaiming risky human-driven climate change is a “hoax.” In fact, as with climate, there are real issues related to spin and the realities of the scientific and economic research, but there is also strong evidence for a real problem deserving a response.
Melinda Gates, in a CNN interview a few days ago, described how she reconciles her own Catholic faith with her activism on family planning: “Part of what I do with the (Gates) Foundation comes from that incredible social justice I had growing up and belief that all lives, all lives are of equal value.” There’s more from her in an “Impatient Optimists” blog post. Here’s a Gates Foundation video laying out her argument (followed by more on “unmet need” research and Walker’s population thoughts): Read more…
The report is written by Leonardo Maugeri, a top oil company executive from Italy who is currently a research fellow at the Geopolitics of Energy Project of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Here’s a video interview with Maugeri posted by the Belfer Center:
Maugeri offers a field by field analysis of investments in oil production that provides detailed support for the emerging picture of an oil boom conveyed in recent reports in The Times, including Jad Mouawad’s article “Fuel to Burn: Now What?” Similar themes echo in Daniel Yergin’s recent book “The Quest.”
After a detailed exploration of the reasons for the current increase in oil production capacity, with much more coming after 2020, Maugeri warns that the oil industry will need to work hard to limit environmental risks from greatly expanded drilling for oil (and natural gas) in shale deposits, a vast resource that has been made tappable by hydraulic fracturing, known also as fracking. The report doesn’t address the implications for climate policy and energy efficiency that would attend a prolonged era of abundant oil. I’m sure others, here and elsewhere, will dive in on that issue.
Here’s an excerpt in which Maugeri explains why he sees a decent chance that the United States will become second only to Saudi Arabia in oil production by 2020 (abundant deposits of shale oil are only one): Read more…
As an appetizer, here’s one, from Robert Johnson, the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, who, among other things, said: Read more…
The National Academy of Sciences did a great service to science early this week by holding a conference on “The Science of Science Communication.” A centerpiece of the two-day meeting was a lecture titled “Thinking That We Know,” delivered by Daniel Kahneman, the extraordinary behavioral scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics despite never having taken an economics class.
The talk is extraordinary for the clarity (and humor) with which he repeatedly illustrates the powerful ways in which the mind filters and shapes what we call information. He discusses how this relates to the challenge of communicating science in a way that might stick.
Please carve out the time to watch his slide-free, but image-rich, talk. It’s a shorthand route to some of the insights described in Kahneman’s remarkable book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (I’m a third of the way through).
Here’s the video of the talk (which is “below the fold” because it’s set up to play automatically): Read more…
At the recent United Nations conference on “gross national happiness,” a scattering of young participants looked on with a clear sense of urgency as mainly graying dignitaries, economists, scholars and others pondered ways to gauge progress that go beyond traditional monetary measures. One was Christopher Stampar, a sophomore from the University of Miami who works for the nonprofit group Nourish 9 Billion. He received one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause when he let it slip that he was 19. Read his blog post on the experience here.
Also on hand was Michael Sandmel, who is graduating this year from New York University and involved with the organization U.S. Youth for Sustainable Development. After the one-day session, which included briefings from economic luminaries including Jeffrey Sachs and the economics Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz, he reacted this way in an e-mail message:
It’s great to see new paradigm slowly making its way into the mainstream. I think this is demonstrated quite well by the comments made by professors Sachs and Stiglitz, neither of whom, even four years ago, I would have expected to reference the Easterlin Happiness Paradox or the Planetary Boundaries Framework.
But he added that his generation was not taking a transition for granted, pointing to the student-organized Transition to a New Economy conference that had just been held Harvard:
We had around 140 attendees from universities around the country. Many of us study in mainstream neoclassical economics departments where interdisciplinary ecological-economics, and the questioning of G.D.P. growth as a primary (or, depending on who you ask, desirable) objective, is still very much fringe thinking. I don’t attempt to speak for all of my peers, but I know that many of us share an enormous frustration with the way in which our supposedly leading institutions teach us about the economy in a way that is myopic, ahistorical, and devoid of nearly any critical conversation about sustainability or human well being.
This is particularly troubling as we regularly see our schools accredit future leaders in business, finance, and government, sending them into a world of 21st century problems with a 20th century toolkit. Many of us have been involved in our local Occupy movements, including Occupy Harvard, and have been trying to use the crisis as an opportunity to push an agenda of plausible alternatives to unsustainable and inequitable finance-dominated capitalism. Many of us will be getting together again in June for the Strategies for a New Economy conference at Bard College and will be in Brazil for the Rio+20 conference and the events surrounding it.
He put me in touch with Rina Kuusipalo, the Harvard student who was one of the organizers of the campus economics meeting. She sent the note below: Read more…
12:16 p.m. | Live Updates below |
I’m at the United Nations today for the Bhutan-led “High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” The details are nicely summarized in a recent Op-Ed article by Timothy W. Ryback, the deputy secretary general of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris. As Ryback explains, the meeting was approved in a U.N. resolution last year recognizing that “the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal” and “the gross domestic product [G.D.P.] does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people….”
Bhutan is a tiny, poor, once-isolated Himalayan nation well into the process of moving from monarchy to democracy and opening to the world. Recognizing problems attending a growth-driven economic sprint in other developing countries, in the early 1970’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness. The goal ever since has been a mix of economic and social progress shaped to sustain cultural and environmental assets. (There’s a fun explanatory video here.) I first wrote on this concept in 2005, when several dozen Bhutanese leaders, scholars and other citizens, attending a conference in Nova Scotia, described efforts to move from happiness as a concept to a set of policies.
The New York TimesA continuous survey in the United States now gauges day-to-day shifts in feelings of happiness or sadness. (Click for full graphic.)
Today’s meeting (you can track it via the Twitter hashtag #gnh) reflects a global build-up of this notion under other names, as an array of nations and agencies develop systems for measuring well-being that go well beyond what can be measured in dollars. (The Gallup pollsters and the health-care company Healthways have developed a polling project that aims to be a real-time U.S. Well-being Index. I think that a short-term time scale like that — daily polling of 1,000 people — kind of misses the point, but it’s a useful experiment.)
On a different scale is the newly published World Happiness Report, prepared for this conference by economists John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia, Richard Layard at the London School of Economics and Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University (the full document as a pdf file). You can read a short excerpt below. Read more…
He has now greatly expanded on his critique of their argument in “Why Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” an essay in the New York Review of Books (hat tip to Climate Progress). His strong words are particularly significant given that Nordhaus has, in the past, strongly challenged analyses — notably the Stern Review — pointing to high economic costs from global warming.
He addresses their science conclusions by citing the peer-reviewed literature. More importantly, he points out a basic error in how they weighed costs and benefits and then examines their use of uncertainty as a justification for stasis on greenhouse gas emissions. Here’s his exploration of the second point: Read more…
Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists criticizes their take on the science in a piece titled, “Dismal Science at The Wall Street Journal.” Peter Gleick, an analyst of global water and climate issues, chides the newspaper in a Forbes post, noting that the Journal turned down a letter of concern about human-driven climate change from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences (which ended up published in the journal Science). Chris Mooney dismantles what he calls the authors’ “reductio ad Lysenko” argument. There’s lots more. (Of course Climate Depot finds the letter breathlessly exciting.)
I’ll be publishing some more scientists’ reactions to the piece shortly, but first I wanted to add a fresh element not dealt with elsewhere so far: a critique of the 16 scientists’ take on climate economics.
After all, any conclusion about the pace of emissions cuts necessary to limit dangers from climate change is implicitly as much (or more) about economics as science.
To learn what’s wrong with the signatories’ read of economic literature, review the following excerpt from an e-mail exchange I had over the weekend with William D. Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, whose work is at the heart of the piece’s rejection of the need for “drastic” steps to curtail greenhouse gas emissions (as if that’s the only kind of response being considered): Read more…
The comments are not publicly viewable at this point. (You can submit a Freedom of Information Law request for an eventual CD, I was told.) But any quick sift of the Web provides a pretty solid sense of the range of views — from environmentalists pursuing an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing and related processes, widely called fracking, to landowners seeking the freedom to benefit from their mineral rights. There was a fresh anti-gas rally in Albany this morning, focused on passing bills (sponsored by lawmakers representing New York City constituents far from the resource) that would limit the governor’s ability to move ahead.
Here’s some background behind the shouting: Read more…
A rare look at a baby kipunji, one of the most endangered monkeys on the planet.
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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. In Dot Earth, which recently moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section, Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Conceived in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Dot Earth tracks relevant developments from suburbia to Siberia. The blog is an interactive exploration of trends and ideas with readers and experts.
Access to cheap energy underpins modern societies. Finding enough to fuel industrialized economies and pull developing countries out of poverty without overheating the climate is a central challenge of the 21st century.
Enshrined in history as an untouchable frontier, the Arctic is being transformed by significant warming, a rising thirst for oil and gas, and international tussles over shipping routes and seabed resources.
Human advancement can be aided by curbing everyday losses like the millions of avoidable deaths from indoor smoke and tainted water, and by increasing resilience in the face of predictable calamities like earthquakes and drought.
Earth’s veneer of millions of plant and animal species is a vital resource that will need careful tending as human populations and their demands for land, protein and fuels grow.
Andrew C. Revkin began exploring the human impact on the environment nearly 30 years ago. An early stop was Papeete, Tahiti. This narrated slide show describes his extensive travels.
How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers. Join the discussion at Green.
The Fish and Wildlife Service wants to eliminate the endangered-species restrictions on gray wolves, but the plan was quickly greeted with criticism by conservationists.
Under a Senate proposal, a home’s projected energy savings could qualify buyers for larger mortgages and lower interest rates than they might otherwise receive.
In the eyes of many along the Elbe and the Danube, it is not too early to raise questions about why the region was hit again so soon after record flooding in 2002.