|
|
Chicken Little on the Beach
One in ten people in the world live less than ten meters above sea level. One in eight city dwellers do the same.
... and? They live there now because coasts enable trade, and trade enables growth, and growth is what lifts people out of poverty. It's only when people are no longer poor that they will begin to care about the environment*, and growth is the only thing that will improve the infrastructure to the point it becomes possible to live on higher ground.
So of course one of the things mentioned as a "problem" is "continuing economic growth." It just won't do to have all these brown people working their way toward wealth and happiness. We must lead them to the correct behaviors! Start massive building projects! Take corporate profits to pay for them! Just because it's never worked before doesn't mean we can't try again!
Maybe I should put a watermelon category up. You know, just to emphasize the reality of the situation.
----
* From memory, this is actually a low number, a per-capita wage of about $8500.
I remember PJ O'Rourke's essay about Bangladesh, where he points out that "economic development assistance" typically results in foreign contractors being paid huge sums to build things that the aid-ed country doesn't need. Like, the country will get ten million dollars from the World Bank, and they'll be told that it has to be used for "infrastructure", so they'll decide to build a highway. Only they don't know how to build a highway, and they don't have any of the equipment to do it. So they hire a foreign construction company to do it, and pay them with the aid money. So now they have given all the money away...and they have a highway that they can't maintain...and only two percent of the population even has a car...
Posted by: DensityDuck on March 29, 2007 12:11 PM