%5 Poverty And Climate Change Become "One"

TomPaine.com - Poverty And Climate Change Become "One"


Poverty And Climate Change Become "One"



In today's News Worthy section, we linked to Ron Brownstein's article on Bono's merger of global poverty activism and U2's latest concert tour. The story is one of the few hopeful political tales to come out of Washington. Bono uses his megastar status to lobby George W. Bush in the afternoon, and then in the evening gets his 20,000-person audience to sign onto his One Campaign declaration using cell phones—during the concert. But that convergence of rock star, advocacy and technology has been trumped by a more powerful convergence.

In today's Independent (UK), Steve Connor writes that, "Britain's most senior independent scientist has warned that global warming threatens to ruin the international initiative to lift Africa out of poverty."

And that takes us way back to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Many will remember that the summit was disrupted by the bombing of the London underground on July 7 of this year. That morning, I wrote about how the bombings attempted to shift the momentum from the Summit's positive focus on poverty and climate change to the nihilism and fear of the Global War on Terror. Real progress on poverty and climate change, I argued, would be the most powerful measures that the international community could take to "drain the swamp" of terrorism.

But back then, the moderate commentariat argued that poverty could be handled by doubling the foreign aid budget and forgiving the debt to poor countries while climate change could be tackled by the industrialized countries—if they could figure out a way to get the U.S. and China into some kind of binding agreement on carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, such "simple," aid-based solutions have always been pipe dreams. Poverty cannot be overcome by more spending and debt relief, although these things will help. As the noted development economist Hernando de Soto writes, what needs to happen in the developing world is a radical reform in popular access to property rights systems so that the 4.5 billion people excluded from the modern global economy can enter it. All the development aid schemes operate on the assumption that there are working markets in the developing world. There are not.

But if we want to bring 4.5 billion people into the global economy, we need to have that economy be sustainable. Right now, that's just not the case. Our economy is based on oil as a transport fuel, and demand has met supply. There is no room for expansion of the gasoline market because prices will be too high for poor folks to afford. Not to mention that 4.5 people increasing their consumption of manufactured goods will destroy even more of the global ecosystem .

Bono's One Campaign is exciting, no doubt. But its focus on health care, education, water and food is strategically misplaced. At the most basic level, climate change is destroying the ability of the world's poorest to grow their crops, as drought ravages agricultural areas. At another level, the market infrastructure required to let health care, education, water and food reforms survive is nonexistent. Finally, even if we could raise people up out of poverty, that means an increase in energy and natural resource consumption per capita, and we're experiencing a global scarcity in both of those areas already.

In other words, the "One" campaign is trying to rebrand the concept of "charity;" the idea that the rich West only needs to transfer more dollars to the highly impoverished nations. But the problem is bigger than what charity can overcome. The challenge of poverty is structural and it is rooted in the economics of the United States.

That's the "one" thing that needs to change.