We Don’t Care About the World’s Poor, Do We?

Another nail has been hammered into the coffin of the world's poor.

Earlier this week, a program dedicated to improving the ability of poor countries' capacity to weather climate-related effects like floods and drought, has been shut down due to shrinking federal science budgets. The program, many say, was unique.

The program, called the Center for Capacity Building, has been housed at the National Center for Atmospheric Studies (NCAR) in Boulder, CO., since 2004. It was built largely upon the work of its director, Michael Glantz, who is most concerned with the human face of climate extremes.

This is not entirely unexpected; Congress and the White House have been haggling over science funding for the past few years. The result has been a center that is shedding jobs. Over the past five years, more than a hundred have been cut, out of a thousand at the center. The center's budget totals $120 million. Michael Glantz's program accounted for $500,000.

Over at the NY Times, Andrew Revkin quoted Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, as saying, "In terms of value for money, Dr. Glantz's science was among the best, being cutting-edge and cost-effective, yet influencing the world. He also ensured that science was used for humanity and by humanity."

But the real value of Glantz's program lies elsewhere, in the collective responsibility owed by the world's carbon emitters to the world's poor.

Why? Because, to borrow a phrase from the Presidential primaries, there are two worlds: one for those who can cope with climate change, and one for those who can't.

First world countries will be able to withstand the changes; we have the financial and infrastructural resources to withstand the rising price of food and fuel. The worlds poor won't fare nearly as well. Given that climate change will push current climatic conditions to their extremes, wet areas will get wetter, dry areas drier, and those 1.2 billion who already live on the brink of starvation will be pushed over the edge.

If climate change is the cause, we -- the affluent, the educated, the merely lucky -- will be responsible. The United States, for instance, with 5 percent of the world's population, uses around 24 percent of the world's energy making it, until recently, the largest greenhouse gas emitter. China, many argue, recently surpassed it.

Meanwhile, according to Jeffrey Sachs's book The End of Poverty, around one billion people live in extreme poverty. They are too hungry, too ill, too destitute, to climb the ladder of development. They live on the brink. All they need is a nudge from climatic changes, and they could be pushed over the edge.

At such instances as these, we are reminded of a simple truth: climate change is a moral issue. Morality implies responsibility, and responsibility the possibility of good. In dissolving the Center for Capacity Building the US stepped away from that responsibility.

Why do you think this is? I have a few ideas, which I'll blog about next week.

In the meantime, Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a scientist at NCAR, has written well about the declining funding for science. You can find his blog here.

You can also read articles from Michael Glantz here.

(Photo credit: TURKAIRO @ flickr, used under the Creative Commons license.)