Recent News
Dear all,
As most of you know I read the newspaper a lot. Or rather I read the online news a lot. I tend to read the BBC and New York Times sites daily. So I was really surprised a few days ago with the environmental report issued by a promient economist in the UK. It got huge coverage in the BBC and several other international papers and sites but it was a sidelined item in the US news. This is a really important report I think. It shows how global warming is going to change you life and (vastly more important) your money. So the short of the report is that if we continue to do nothing then in around 40 years the entire world will be around 20% poorer (a 20% drop in global GDP). But if we spent 1% of global GDP we can avert this. If we start, NOW. So I was really surprised that this report got no coverage at all in the US press from what I can see. I think given the option people would like to be only 1% poorer and not 20%. But somehow I think we are just really all s****** in this. The only way we can avoid a very bad global warming (warming will happen we are too far along, so it is a question of how much of Florida, Hawaii, and such we want to lose) is for every country to do something. Now lets start with the fact that the US and China are the world's biggest polluters. Bot did not sign the Kyoto treaty. And the US won't do anything under Bush to help stop global warming (he is around the only one in the world that thinks there is not enough science to prove it). And China needs power to continue to grow it's economy. The cheapest source of power is.... wait for it... coal power. And coal is dirty. Very bad for the environment. Throw India into the mix and you see how hard it is. There was an article about Australia a few days ago that shows the point. If Australia shut down every power plant in the country the global effect would be meaningless since the growth of China's pollution output would grow by that amount in a year or two. Not technically correct but you get the scale in this example.
So the current outlook for 2050, global environmental fallout which sparks massive wars and a new dark age. I really hope we start a colony on the moon or mars by then. Or we are just not going to be happy. Comments.... please comment.... I need intellectual stimulation.