It seems that everything these days is delivered with a big, shiny “But.” We’re winning in Afghanistan, but… . Iraq is a huge success, but… . We’re going to tackle the greenhouse gas business, but… .
“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
We’re stuck in the era of “Ifs, Ands, or Buts.” For every proposal, every problem, every event there’s bound to be an If or an And or a But thrown in somewhere around the very end to make everything you just heard or read almost completely meaningless. You get your hopes up and then – someone drops the But bomb.
Take this story out of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They just came out with some wonderful news. They’re on track to cut global poverty by half by 2015. Now that is big news, certainly the best thing I’ve heard in a while. Until the But arrives.
It seems we’re poised to cut global poverty in half but, if we don’t want to see that success completely reversed, we’ll have to tackle the little problem of – wait for it – global warming. The bank and the fund define extreme poverty as living on less than $1 per day. That bottom rung still stands at about a billion people.
The industrialization of India and China is creating market demands that spread newfound wealth to many impoverished corners of the earth. Unfortunately that wealth can come at the cost of a nation’s rain forests and fisheries.
Raising a person’s income from under $1 per day to over $1 per day may be significant to the World Bank or the IMF but it isn’t that great a blessing for the individual who finds that grain prices and his basic sustenance have increased 100% in just one year. It isn’t much of a boon if that individual can no longer find affordable fish to buy.
What it all boils down to is that the World Bank/International Monetary Fund goal of halving global poverty is being assessed in the context of a world that doesn’t exist – a world without resource depletion, food shortages and all the environmental effects that are already being felt due to global warming. Give them credit for good intentions, but…
The Mound of Sound 