by John Goetz
Kate Raworth of Oxfam International recently authored a 34-page report that began: “In failing to tackle climate change with urgency, rich countries are effectively violating the human rights of millions of the world’s poorest people.”
Kate goes on to claim that we now have determined with “scientific certainty” that climate change (not global warming?) is
creating floods, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and seasonal unpredictability. The result is failed harvests, disappearing islands, destroyed homes, water scarcity, and deepening health crises, which are undermining millions of peoples’ rights to life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture.
In other words, countries like the US, France, Britain, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada (I listed members of the G8) are essentially using global warming to violate the human rights of, well, basically the rest of the world.
It certainly is an interesting tack for a climate change activist to take. Most people don’t like being accused of violating another’s human rights. Obviously, if Oxfam can convince people that by driving their kids to soccer practice that they are in fact depriving someone of their food, health, or even life, they will be motivated by guilt to change their habits. Images of polar bears floating on ice floes must not have been enough.
Oxfam calls for urgent action, as outlined and excerpted here:
Rich countries must lead now in cutting global emissions
The science is clear: global warming must stay well below 2C to avoid creating irreversible climate impacts that would undermine millions of people’s rights. To keep the risk of exceeding 2C low, global emissions must peak by 2015 and then fall by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
[How far below 2C “well below” means is unclear]
Rich countries must provide the finance needed for low-carbon technologies in developing countries
Since rich countries’ excessive emissions have left the rest of the world with so little atmospheric space, the global reductions required now threaten the right to development in poor countries. Rich countries must therefore deliver the finance and technology needed for poor countries to develop on low-carbon pathways and realise rights at the same time.
[Now global warming is reducing the size of the atmosphere!]
Rich countries must halt their biofuel policies which are undermining poor people’s right to food
…the current rush into biofuels is both failing to deliver emissions cuts, and undermining the rights of people in developing countries…Food prices have risen over 80 per cent in the last three years, with grain-price rises costing developing economies $324bn last year alone – more than three times what they received in aid. Rich-country biofuel programmes have been identified by the International Monetary Fund, among others, as a principal driver of this crisis, and may already be responsible for having pushed 30 million people into poverty.
[Does this mean Brazil can continue producing ethanol? And should we stop research into algal fuels?]
Rich countries must provide the finance needed for international adaptation
Since rich countries’ excessive emissions have put poor people’s rights at risk in developing countries, human-rights norms create a strong obligation for them to provide a remedy by financing adaptation…Adaptation finance must be provided as grants, since people in poor countries should not be expected to repay the funds needed to remedy violations of their rights.
[I think we need a list of “rich” and “poor” countries. Where do China, India, Brazil, and the UAE fall?]
Developing countries must focus their adaptation strategies on the most vulnerable people
National adaptation strategies must put communities at the centre of planning, focus particularly on women’s needs and interests, and guarantee essentials through social protection. Good practice is emerging – and it is working – but needs to spread much faster.
[I found this surprising. Does it mean global warming affects women more than men?]
Developing countries must have ownership in managing international adaptation funds
Since adaptation finance is owed to safeguard the rights of communities facing climate impacts, their governments must have ownership in managing international adaptation funds and, in turn, must be accountable to those communities when spending the finance.
[I am sure there is no threat of corruption, because this is climate change aid.]
Companies must call on governments to act with far greater urgency in cutting global emissions
In the run up to the UN’s 2007 Climate Conference in Bali, the business leaders of 150 leading global companies – from the USA to Europe, Australia, and China – called for a ‘sufficiently ambitious, international and comprehensive legally-binding United Nations agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’, in order to give business long, legal, and loud signals to scale up investment in low-carbon technologies.
[Isn’t investment made when a return is to be had?]
Companies must take significant steps to cut their global emissions
Too few companies have started exploring how their own operations can be made climate resilient, let alone how their strategies for achieving supply-chain resilience could help or harm the communities – farmers, workers, neighbours, and consumers – they interact with in developing countries.
[That gives me an idea for a new executive position at my company: Chief Climate Resilience Officer]
So there you have it. Joe Smith, an apple farmer in Baroda, MI – if you want to clear your conscience of the human rights violations you are committing against Ho Si Thuan, a rice farmer in Quang Tri province, Viet Nam – you better start lobbying the US government and US companies to implement the steps outlined above. Otherwise, Mr. Thuan’s misfortunes will fall squarely in your lap.
icefree:
When I did public health in Germany, the community water systems were not chlorinated. German courts had decided that adding chlorine to the water constituted subjecting the public to involuntary medication…similar to the stand you sometimes see taken against flouride here in the US. I understand that most of the EU has been going along with this idea…but I’ve been back here for several years, so someone correct me if things have changed.
cdl
Yet another charity that I need to stop my monthly donations to, on account of their policies. This reminds me of a particular UK charity devoted to helping the homeless. I heard from people who work closely on the scene, that the policies of this homelessness charity end up keeping on the street individuals who are known to be violent and a danger to the community. In their thinking, they are protecting the individual from the bad evil authoritarian system/state, but in pursuing their warped worldview, they end up creating new and real victims. Basically they believe that the individuals were not “bad”, they were simply mentally unable to control their own behavior, and so it would be “grossly unfair” to take action against them, and they work to block the authorities’ actions. Meanwhile these individuals continue to harass, abuse, steal, threaten, and assault members of the community. It was a real eye opener which made me wonder where my money was going.
It can take more energy to produce ethanol than you get back from the ethanol. But it doesn’t have to.
It all depends upon the crop, the land, the climate, the various costs of farming, and the method of making ethanol. Traditional fermentation of grains isn’t very effective and you probably won’t break even. Modern industrial fermentation can bring you somewhat above the break even point. It still isn’t good enough.
Bottom line: grains won’t do it. Better to eat them ourselves.
Sugar cane, switchgrass, and several other crops do much better. Fermentation is economically worthwhile. Even so, this is not the long term solution. It is hard on land and removes it from food production.
We can also produce ethanol from roughage such as corn stalks and other cellulosic materials. Unfortunately nature isn’t helping our scientists much. The scientists will work it out. Five years.
Another approach is to use algae and CO2 and sunlight. No crop input at all. This is simple in concept, difficult in execution, and not very successful yet. But it will be. Over five years away.
Remember, it is not sufficient that a method work. It must defeat other energy sources. Nuclear, wind, fossil, solar. It must also defeat rival biofuels such as biodiesel or butanol. Don’t bet on ethanol ever being a dominant fuel.
Oxfam. Sorry I farm and their stance on agricultureal issues are dead wrong. THe answer to feeding the poor is more technology(improved seed genetics,fertilization, and the use of pesticidies) and allowing free markets to work. In Africa the most hunger and the poorest human conditions happen because of tyranny or dictatorships. Their answer to global agricultureal policy is dead wrong so anything they have to say about Carbon Dioxide or glabal warming has to be jusr as wrong headed
New water purification systems use ozone to oxidize the bacteria and organic molecules. The ozone decomposes back to oxygen in a short period of time. However, remember this: These methods destroy the pathogens and chemicals but at then end they are still in the water.
That reminds me of the story where a woman asks W.C. Fields:
Woman: “Why don’t you drink water?”
W.C. Fields: “Because fish piss in it!”
I think this is the exact quote: “”I can’t stand water because of the things fish do in it.”
Sean
there is a simple answer to higfh food prices because of biofuels. Allow more acres out of the Conservation Reserve Program. There are millions of acres that could be released to grow crops but lobbying by several conservation and hunting groups kept these acres in the program. You can now enjoy hunting more phesant and quail.
Corn prices were also driven higher this summer by speculators. Corn reached $8.00 a buschel because of the amount of money speculators had in the corn market. Corn is now in the 45.00 range.
” It certainly is an interesting tack for a climate change activist to take.”
I don’t think anyone should be surprised by this approach. This is right out of the Marxist playbook. Sorry for diving below the line here and being so cynical, but it’s hard not to believe the underlying agenda for many who champion the climate change dogma is an ultimate normalization of the world’s wealth.
The AGW alarmists need to understand that a business case needs to be made for any alternatives they are suggesting otherwise taking the sort of actions they recommend will only result in an overall reduction in wealth in the west and even poverty.
The problem with losing wealth and poverty is that societies affected tend not to focus on higher order issues such as social justice, the environment, the arts, education and so on. But in their desparate need to get out of poverty they may listen to the socialist promising a workers’ paradise; e.g Hugo Chavez.
Ah … now I see the strategy.
Ray,
Did I misunderstand you? Ethanol is added to our gasoline via a congrssional mandate. The oil companies resisted but lost. It is very expensive to handle ethanol due to it’s affinity for water and it’s short shelf life. Every gasoline fuel tank had to be cleaned and/or replaced to handle ethanol. Even so, many boaters experienced major problems including fuel tank failures, engine failures, breakdowns, hose and gasket failures, and carburetor problems. I know some privately owned fuel stations decided to go out of the gas sale business rather than spend the money.
Also the alternative oxygenate MTBE (that was initially pushed by the greenies and the government) was subsequently found to risk pollution in our undergroundwater system since it is soluble in water. Congress refused to allow lawsuit liability limits. With unlimited liabiity, no one would continue to use MTBE to satisfy the EPA mandated oxygenate. Me thinks the congress was giving the corn lobby yet another bone for votes and favors mostly from AMD (Archer Daniels Midland) and the corn lobby.
OK, it was a long post and perhaps many did not read all the way through, but I wanted to point out what I personally thought was the most amazing point made in the Oxfam paper:
Emphasis mine.
Are they saying global warming affects women more than men?
Old Farmers Almanac: Global cooling may be underway
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2008-09-09-farmers-almanac_N.htm
Bottom line let the free market decide, not mandates or subsidies determine the relative benefits of ethanol. So far the free market tells us that Ethanol is a bust.
Amen to that!
If these so-called “greedy oil companies” are so darn greedy, don’t folks think they will act in their greedy self-interest? Sheesh!
I think that one of the reality separations between the US and the rest of the world is that they don’t really understand (or accept the reality of) the sharp division between US wealth and political power.
Nor do a lot of Americans, either, but that’s another sad story. Yes, we have lobbies. Yes, money talks. But it doesn’t rule, and it hasn’t for quite some time.
I think there is one big assumption that most on the left-of-spectrum make, such as this author. That is the right to “life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture.”
If these things are truly rights, then that must include the right to force another person, with physical violence if necessary, to provide it for them. These are not, and cannot be, rights because inherent in them is the obligation of another to subordinate their own rights to them.
No person has a right to force another human being to perform labour for their own benefit. Period. America gave up that idea about 150 years ago, but it looks like it’s alive and well in some quarters.
Nope. Bicycles require manufacturing facilities, steel (or aluminum or some alloy), rubber, plastic, etc. They want us in bare feet and unclothed, living in caves or out in the open.
Anyone remember what Edison went through when inventing the lightbulb? Anyone? What did the gas company want to do? Encourage him? Join in the experiments? Share the profits from lightbulbs? Or stand by gas lights? Times of creative inventions are haralded not by supporters but by detractors. We are in a time of creativity regarding energy and this blog is full of detractors. What the detractors fail to see is that we are in the period of the first 1000 tries not working so well. I could not give a rat’s ass about CO2. But I am all for inventiveness. And a free market economy regarding ethanol sources. Along with any other energy invention that doesn’t work at first. One of them eventually will.
So, she says that the rich countries “are undermining millions of peoples’ rights to life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture.”
There has, over the past century, been such a proliferation of ‘rights’ that the concept itself is becoming so trivialized to the point of becoming meaningless. How are such alleged ‘rights’ to be satisifed?
As Ayn Rand noted in her essay, Man’s Rights, {April 1963}:
“The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own efforts, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”
and
“The right to life…does not mean that others must provide him with food, clothing and shelter.”
and
“The right to property…does not mean that others must provide him with property.”
Of course in promulgating all these alleged ‘rights’, it is now so easy to let glibly slide off your tongue any other manufactured ‘right’ you can imagine without having the faintest idea of what a real right is.
I think that Edison found 10,000 things that did not work as filaments. But what did he mean by not working? Well, of course it had to glow and keep glowing reliably day and night. It also had to be cheap enough so that he could manufacture it, and sell it at a price high enough to make money and supplant natural gas. Edison did all that after huge investments of time and his own money. He traveled around the world to find the best material for the carbon filament spending approximately $100,000. He found a certain bamboo in Japan that met his specs.
Solar and wind have used billions of OUR tax dollars since the 1970’s, and they are still not cheap enough to sell to the masses, or reliable enough to supplant the existing forms of energy. When we stop funding it, maybe someone will figure out how to make it pay. Until it pays, it will not supplant the cheap, reliable energy that we enjoy today.
Again, this is the transnational beauracrat’s way of fixing the world. Since there is no way that everyone can not be guilty of “climate change,” and we are so certain that the climate is changing for the utmost worst, it is everybody’s fault. Thus everybody gets a piece of the blame and thus everybody gets their own outlined responsibilities.
You know, once upon a time, responsibility used to belong to the realm of the individual. Individuals take responsibility or not. You can’t really pin it on a collective or a group because some out of those people may have chosen to do their utmost, as is their right, to try and alleviate the situation. Others, such as we here, may disagree with the analysis of the situation and choose not to take the path outlined, and that is our right.
Seeing this, I have just eight words for Ms. Raworth of Oxfam:
“Kindly stay out of my business. Thank you.”
Oh Mr Goetz, you are such a tease! I know you wrote this just to get someone to rant:
(15:15:39) :
” “… National adaptation strategies must put communities at the centre of planning, focus particularly on women’s needs and interests, and guarantee essentials through social protection.”
…
Are they saying global warming affects women more than men?”
Ok, here goes.
The key is in the heading to this quote, the heading is: “Developing countries must focus their adaptation strategies on the most vulnerable people”.
On the hypothesis that the evil capitalist West is delivering plague and pestilence upon the otherwise wealthy and happy people of the developing world, the question is who suffers most? As a general principle those who suffer most are the elderly, the young and those with pre-existing medical conditions causing increased susceptibility to plague and pestilence.
In the developing world who looks after these vulnerable groups? Women. The men are, presumably, too busy hunting and, in the fetid minds of lefty idealogues, are incapable of doing the things women do.
Therefore, if the vulnerable are to be supported first it is especially important to look after the carers, namely, the women.
It is not that global warming affects women more than men, the point made is that the women are more important in the struggle to look after the vulnerable.
Within the parameters of the argument being advanced there is a certain logic to it, but it’s based on a non sequitur. The Raworth person fails to appreciate that within the societies in which the man is always the hunter-gatherer and the woman is always the carer, it is the man who has the higher status. Culturally it is impossible to by-pass the man and direct aid to the woman without upsetting the whole balance of their community, a balance which has been in place for generations and is the foundation for their lives.
The communities she is talking about are not living in trendy Islington in London, nor in loft apartments by the harbour in Toronto, nor in cosy condos overlooking Central Park in New York City. They are trying to eke out an existence within firmly established cultural boundaries. Upsetting those boundaries is likely to do more harm than good
Since everyone else is talking about ethanol, it is worth noting that the position advanced by the Raworth person is exactly the argument put forward by the bio-fuel eco-nutters. They call for a particular course of action because that course of action would be beneficial if it were entirely independent of everything else. So concentrated are they on their obsession with a narrow single issue that they fail to realise the change they promote has consequences.
And in direct answer to your question, Mr Goetz, of course global warming affects women more than men. We can drink a warming pint but it melts the ice in their gin and tonics. (::: running for cover before Miss Skywalker hits me :::)
@FatBigot:
It is the ice and the tonic that makes this cheap Victory gin tolerable.
What fear awaits Al Gore in Room 101?
Having to decrease his carbon foot print.
“Rich countries must halt their biofuel policies which are undermining poor people’s right to food.”
So NOW the biofuels thingy is bad; and who put us up to that mess, I wonder?
So you want those Iowa ethanol farm subsidies cut… good luck with that!
“I don’t think anyone should be surprised by this approach.”
I agree 100%. This whole CAGW thing is heavily informed by the fact that certain people HATE the West, in particular the United States, and HATE the fact that we are prosperous while many other countries are poor.
I have long analogized the CAGW scare with the Duke Lacrosse Hoax. Why did the Duke Lacrosse Hoax gain so much traction? Because of symbolic resonance. A lot of people are really attached to the idea that rich white men are raping (literally & figuratively) poor black women.
Oxfam has teamed up for this with the President of the Maldives, suddenly a defender of human rights after having run the country as “Dictator” for 30 years